China may leapfrog Japan to have the most say after the United States in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) after a structural reform of the fund's governance, a senior IMF official said yesterday.

"There is a possibility that China's quota will rise to second, when the reform concludes by 2011," Daisuke Kotegawa, IMF's executive director for Japan, told China Daily.

Each member country is assigned a quota, based broadly on its relative size in the global economy; and the quota determines its maximum financial commitment to the IMF as well as its voting power.