Obviously, few industrial countries dominated the Fund’s governance in its very early days. Nevertheless, to reflect the equity of member countries - though in a very limited way - each member country was assigned 250 basic votes in addition to its votes determined by quotas. And the basic votes accounted for 11.3 percent of the total votes at the inception of the IMF.
The following decades have witnessed great changes in global political and economic environment, including emergence of many newly independent sovereign countries, collapse of the Bretton Woods system, the oil crises in the 1970s, the international debt crises in the 1980s, booming international private capital flows throughout most 1990s and subsequent capital account crises in several emerging markets in the late 1990s.