The International Monetary Fund (IMF) announced Tuesday that it has selected French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde to serve as its next managing director, despite the widespread call from emerging economies for their candidate to head the institution.

The IMF Executive Board said it has picked Lagarde to serve as IMF Managing Director and Madame Chairman of the Executive Board for a five-year term starting from July 5, 2011.

Lagarde will become the first woman named to the top IMF post since the institution's inception in 1944.

The 24-member board said Lagarde and Mexican central bank governor Agustin Carstens are both "well qualified" candidates, and it decided on Lagarde by consensus, Xinhua reported.

The appointment of Lagarde as IMF Managing Director came as little surprise in recent days after she was endorsed by China on Monday. She also received US support early Tuesday, hours before the IMF announcement. Russia and most of the European countries also backed her, China Daily reported.

China's Central Bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan, who was in Europe with visiting Premier Wen Jiabao, said in London on Monday that China has already expressed "quite full support" for Lagarde's candidacy, the Dow Jones Newswires reported. Lagarde visited Beijing this month to garner China's support.

The United States, which chose this time to wait for the rest of the world to make their decisions first, expressed its support early Tuesday in a written statement by Secretary of Treasury Timothy Geithner.

The US holds about 17 percent of the voting rights at IMF, by far the largest compared with any other countries. Europe, as a whole, has 32 percent of the voting block, while Japan and China rank second and third, respectively, in voting rights as a country, according to China Daily.

The IMF was turned into turmoil after former Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn resigned on May 18 to face charges of sexually assaulting a hotel maid in New York. He has denied the allegations.

The Managing Director is the chief of the IMF's operating staff and chair of the Executive Board. The IMF chief is assisted by three Deputy Managing Directors in the operation of the Fund, which serves 187 member countries.

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