International Monetary Fund (IMF) – Profile
The International Monetary Fund (IMF)
The IMF is an international organization of 185 member countries. It was established to promote international monetary cooperation, exchange stability, and orderly exchange arrangements; to foster economic growth and high levels of employment; and to provide temporary financial assistance to countries to help ease balance of payments adjustment.
The IMF is the world’s central organization for international monetary cooperation. It is an organization in which almost all countries in the world work together to promote the common good.
The IMF is governed by, and is accountable to, its member countries through its Board of Governors. There is one Governor from each member country, typically the finance minister or central bank governor.
Key policy issues related to the international monetary system are considered twice a year by a committee of Governors called the International Monetary and Financial Committee, or the IMFC.
The day-to-day work of the IMF is carried out by the Executive Board, which receives its powers from the Board of Governors, and the IMF’s internationally recruited staff. The Executive Board selects the IMF’s Managing Director, who is appointed for a renewable five-year term.
The IMF’s resources come mainly from the quotas that countries deposit when they join the IMF. Quotas broadly reflect the size of each member’s economy: the larger a country’s economy in terms of output, and the larger and more variable its trade, the larger its quota tends to be. For example, the United States, the world’s largest economy, has the largest quota in the IMF. Quotas are reviewed periodically and can be increased when deemed necessary by the Board of Governors.
If necessary, the IMF may borrow from a number of its financially strongest member countries to supplement the resources available from its quotas. It has done so on several occasions when borrowing countries needed large amounts of financing and a failure to help them might have put the international monetary system at risk.
