Some ultra-compact dwarf galaxies have large dynamical mass to light (M/L) ratios and also appear to contain an overabundance of LMXB sources, and some Milky Way globular clusters have a low concentration and appear to have a deficit of low-mass stars. These observations can be explained if the stellar IMF becomes increasingly top-heavy with decreasing metallicity and increasing gas density of the forming object. The thus constrained stellar IMF then accounts for the observed trend of metallicity and M/L ratio found amongst M31 globular star clusters. Since the galaxy-wide IMF (gwIMF) is made up of the IMFs of all embedded cluster forming in a galaxy, it becomes possible to calculate the gwIMF. This calculation shows that the systematically varying IMF accounts for the overall shift of the observationally deduced gwIMF from top-light to top-heavy with increasing star formation rate amongst galaxies. This is an important self-consistency check between star formation on pc scales and galaxy-wide stellar populations. The implications of this for observations of extremely young very massive star-burst clusters observed at a high redshift which may appear quasar-like will be discussed based on our recent work (Jerabkova et al. 2017).