By Axel Bugge
HORSHAM, England, March 14 (Reuters) - Leaders from the G20 leading economies will decide at their meeting next month on the amount of new funds that will be given to the IMF, Brazilian central bank head Henrique Meirelles said on Saturday.
Meirelles said G20 finance ministers did not discuss specific amounts needed to bolster the International Monetary Fund during a meeting in southern England this weekend but there was general agreement it needs to happen.
"We didn't reach numbers here," Meirelles told Reuters during the meeting. "Now, evidently the specific decisions on numbers and so on will be taken at the (April 2) meeting of heads of state."
IMF officials have said the international lender needs to double its resources to $500 billion to strengthen its ability to help developing nations facing funding crises during the global downturn. Japan has offered $100 billion and the European Union is considering a loan to the IMF of $100 billion, leaving a shortfall of $50 billion.
Meirelles said that in addition to more funding from IMF members, the lender's ability to take on more debt should rise, through a mechanism such as the issuance of $250 billion more Special Drawing Rights.
"This would have another advantage as well; it would consolidate another reserve currency," he said.
SDRs, whose value is based on a basket of major currencies, are allocated by the IMF to its member countries and are backed by member countries' governments.
Meirelles repeated statements that leading emerging nations would not raise their contributions to the IMF unless their voting rights at the lending agency were also increased.
But he said that the G20 meeting this weekend in southern England had marked a key shift in transferring global economic power to emerging nations, something he said was crucial to repairing the global economic downturn.
"There is a conclusion that has been reached in recent years, which is that the resolution to today's global problems is only possible with the participation of emerging countries," Meirelles said.
"There is a natural evolution of the decision-making process, which many important countries agree on, that decisions move from the G7 to the G20," he said.
Reflecting that, the Financial Stability Forum announced just before the meeting that it would expand to include the major emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, China and India and all other G20 members.
The FSF is made up of central bankers and finance ministers, up to now mainly from the older economic powers, and looks at financial market supervision and surveillance.
Meirelles said he believed there was broad understanding at this weekend's meeting that the key to hauling the world economy out of its crisis is to resolve the toxic assets clogging up the balance sheets of banks.
"There is no doubt that it was understood that in the first place the problem of toxic assets has to be resolved," he said.
(Reporting by Axel Bugge; Editing by Ruth Pitchford)