To many people in the street, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is perhaps known as a bank that lends money to countries in some sort of crisis. This is not entirely correct.

The IMF is more like a rural cooperative or a credit union on a global scale where members have established rules on how much each would contribute to the fund (that is, the quota system) and when and how to use the fund (that is, lending facilities). Indeed, the fund is not meant for "investment" or "development" but for temporary relief of shorter-term external funding pressures.

Moreover, each member has a say proportional to what it contributes to the fund, which in turn is a reflection of its relative economic size, on how these rules should be changed (that is, representation).