Unifying EU Representation at the IMF Executive Board

Peter Brandner, Harald Grech and Iain Paterson
Additional contact information
Peter Brandner: Federal Ministry of Finance, Austria
Harald Grech: Oesterreichische Nationalbank
Iain Paterson: Department of Economics and Finance, Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna, Austria

No 245, Economics Series from Institute for Advanced Studies

Abstract: The consequences of consolidating EU representation at the IMF Executive Board by regrouping the 27 Member States into two EU constituencies, euro area and non-euro area, are discussed. In particular we contrast voting power as proposed by Penrose-Banzhaf (PBI) and Shapley-Shubik (SSI), and other respectively related measures of blocking (or veto) power and decision efficiency as proposed by Coleman and Paterson. Hitherto, IMF-specific literature is PBI-based. However, theoretical reasons and empirical plausibility arguments for the SSI are compelling. The (SSI) voting power of the two large constituencies – U.S.A. and euro area – reflects their corresponding voting shares over a range of majority thresholds, whereas PBI voting power reduces to only half of vote share at the majority threshold of 85% needed for some Executive Board decisions. SSI-related estimates of veto power are generally lower than the Coleman indices. Correspondingly, the efficiency of collective decision-making is considerably underestimated by the Coleman measure;

Keywords: International Monetary Fund; European Union; Voting power analysis; Veto power (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C71 D71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2009-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-eec
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://irihs.ihs.ac.at/id/eprint/1961 First version, 2009 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ihs:ihsesp:245

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
Institute for Advanced Studies - Library, Josefstädterstr. 39, A-1080 Vienna, Austria

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Series from Institute for Advanced Studies Josefstädterstr. 39, A-1080 Vienna, Austria. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Doris Szoncsitz ().