Power Relations in the International Monetary Fund: A Study of the Political Economy of a Priori Voting Power Using the Theory of Simple Games

In general in organizations whose system of governance involves weighted majority voting, power and voting weight differ. Power indices are a value concept for majority voting games which provide a means of analyzing this difference. This paper provides new algorithms for computing the two classical power indices (the Banzhaf index and the Shapley-Shubik index) and applies them to the voting distribution in the two governing bodies of the IMF each year since its foundation.