Emerging nations to help boost IMF funds - Brazil

‘If the eurozone bolsters its financial firewall’:

MEXICO CITY: Emerging countries will help boost IMF funds if the eurozone bolsters its financial firewall and they are given more decision-making power at the fund, Brazil's finance minister said Saturday.

Guido Mantega spelled out the conditions after meeting with his counterparts from the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, China, India and South Africa) on the sidelines of a meeting of G20 finance ministers and central bankers in Mexico.

“The emerging countries will only help on two conditions: that they (the eurozone) reinforce their firewall...” Mantega said. And “...they will have to go through with the IMF reform” of 2010, which laid out a new system of quotas to increase the voting power of emerging economies in the decision-making of the lending body, he said.

Mantega criticized a “tendency to relapse in relation to the quota reform.”

Since the middle of 2011, Brazil, the largest economy in Latin America and the sixth in the world, said it would help European countries in crisis through the IMF, in return for increasing its decision power.

AFP