But OPEC's record of enforcing quotas on its 12 members is patchy.
Should government try to remedy persistent racial and ethnic inequalities by establishing and enforcing quotas and other statistical goals?
The temporary price of protecting habitats and monitoring and enforcing quotas should be seen as an investment in the future.
In January the eight partners to the agreement began enforcing quotas on the number of days a particular country's vessels could fish the protected waters and requiring payment for additional days.
So if the only good argument for not enforcing board diversity is "no one wants to be a quota" then maybe we all have to accept that in this case, enforcing quotas is the first step on the path to a world without them.
Amid speculation that opponents to the quota would challenge the enforced quota in court, Hungary's anti-immigration Prime Minister Victor Orban accused Ms Merkel of pursuing "moral imperialism".
The Cuban government has had rigidly controlled wages and prices and enforced quota systems since the 1960s, but in 2008, after power changed hands from longtime leader Fidel Castro to his brother Raúl, some of those restrictions were lifted.
In the case of most of the characters in "The Big Green Tent," it leads to collaborating with the K.G.B. Moscow State University, where Ulitskaya wanted to study, had an unofficial but strictly enforced quota on the number of Jews admitted, but in 1962, after applying three times in two years, she was admitted to the biology department.
The central problem is not the wrongdoing of "the few bad apples out there," as Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker, suggests, but department policies, like stop-and-frisk and an aggressively enforced quota system, that foster harsh and arbitrary conduct by police officers on the street.
Critics, including NYPD whistleblower Adrian Schoolcraft, allege that stop-and-frisk is a rigorously enforced quota.
