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Introduction
The global financial crisis of 2007-2009 (GFC) has significantly changed the position of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the global monetary system. Along with an already on-going geopolitical trend - the rise of emerging markets (EMs) - the GFC has prompted a reform process consisting of two basic elements: (1) boosting the IMF's resources in order to enhance the Fund's capacity for international financial crisis management; and (2) increasing the quota and voting power of the EMs in the institution. During 2009 the G20 decided to drastically increase its lending capacity through temporary ad hoc arrangements. In October 2010 this replenishment of the IMF eventually culminated in a comprehensive package for quota and governance reform, including a doubling of the IMF quota, a realignment of the quota structure and a reshuffle of the seats of the Executive Board (EB). Given the Fund's crisis of mission and legitimacy owing to a growing disengagement from the large EMs and competition from national-level self-insurance strategies and regional-level financial arrangements (Broome, 2010), the 2010 reform package might be considered as an extraordinary agreement. Indeed, the basic idea behind the agreement was to restore both the IMF's crisis management capacity and legitimacy. As former Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn (2010) noted at that time: 'We can only be effective if we are legitimate, and we can only be legitimate if we are representative'.
But while Western policymakers and IMF officials have praised the 2010 reform package as a historic agreement, several scholars of International Relations and International Political Economy have argued that the agreement has fallen significantly below expectations (for example Woods, 2010; Malkin and Momani, 2011; Wade, 2011). First, the IMF's new resources remain inadequate to address major financial emergencies in larger economies, restricting the IMF's role as international financial crisis manager to the developing countries and smaller EMs and advanced countries. Second, the power reshuffling in favor of the emerging market and developing countries (EMDCs) is generally considered quite meagre in light of the historical gravity of the GFC and the changed geopolitical context. Consequently, it is highly questionable whether the reform will be able to restore the IMF's legitimacy. However, as it is generally argued that huge foreign exchange reserves have bestowed many EMs with considerable...