Disagreement persists on IMF quotas Top officials at the International Monetary Fund are yet to agree on a fairer way to calculate countries" quotas, which represent voting power at the Fund and are among the most contentious issues between members from emerging and advanced economies. A briefing of a discussion among members of the IMF's executive board in September, released on Tuesday, showed there remained no consensus on the degree to which gross domestic product should be used to formulate quotas. At present, GDP is used to calibrate around half of a member state's IMF quota. The issue of quota reform and IMF governance is set to be a major talking point at this week's annual IMF meeting in Tokyo. The big emerging market countries have attacked the way in which the quotas are calculated on the grounds that they give too much power to advanced economies and fail to reflect their increasing contribution to global GDP. Consensus among the executive board, made up of country directors from the most influential 24 members of the Fund, was not expected before next January, when officials must agree on any amendments to the way quotas are calculated ahead of a broader review of governance arrangements in 2014. The briefing said an unspecified number of executive board members wanted to base the quota formula solely - or at least largely - on GDP. However, others preferred to leave the importance of GDP unchanged and attach more significance to other factors, particularly the openness of particular members" financial systems. The Fund has acknowledged that emerging markets should have more say in the way in which the Fund is run and in 2010 officials signed up to a major quota reform package. But the United States, the IMF's biggest shareholder, has yet to put its quota reform before Congress and is considered highly unlikely to do so before November's presidential elections. That means that the reforms made two years ago will not be able to be implemented at this week's meeting.