The head of the International Monetary Fund warned that Russia’s war against Ukraine was weakening the economic prospects for most of the world’s countries and called high inflation “a clear and present danger’’ to the global economy.

On the 90th day of the Moscow-Kyiv war in Eastern Europe, the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Kristalina Georgieva stated that the war in Ukraine has clouded the global economy’s outlook and might lead to a recession in more vulnerable nations.

According to The Guardian report, Georgieva has forecasted a difficult year in 2022 and refused to rule out a worldwide recession if things continued to deteriorate.

Chronically high inflation, which is forcing the world’s central banks to raise interest rates and likely slow economic growth in the process, amounts to “a massive setback for the global recovery,’’ Georgieva said.

Georgieva also warned of “the fragmentation of the world economy into geopolitical blocs,” with the West imposing far-reaching sanctions on Russia and China expressing support for the autocratic Russian regime of President Vladimir Putin.

“In a world where war in Europe creates hunger in Africa; where a pandemic can circle the globe in days and reverberate for years; where emissions anywhere mean rising sea levels almost everywhere — the threat to our collective prosperity from a breakdown in global cooperation cannot be overstated,” Georgieva said.

“What we were striving for is for growth to go up and the inflation that has become a problem to go down,” Georgieva said. “Instead, we have the exact opposite. Growth is going down, inflation is going up.”

The IMF plans to update its forecasts when it issues a new World Economic Outlook during its April 18-24 Spring Meetings with the World Bank in Washington.

“We are going to see possibly risk of recessions in these countries where shock comes on top of a weak economy.”

Georgieva and IMF First Deputy Managing Director Gita Gopinath also said curtailments of grain shipments from Ukraine and Russia mean higher food inflation and hunger, particularly in Africa.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) had pointed out earlier that both Russia and Ukraine are major commodity producers, and disruptions there have resulted in soaring global prices, especially that of oil and natural gas.

With Ukraine and Russia accounting for up to 30% of the global exports for wheat, food prices, too, have jumped. The IMF added that the entire global economy would feel the effects with slower growth and faster inflation.  

The World Bank also said in its Spring 2022 Economic Update for Europe and Central Asia that the conflict delivered a second major shock to the global economy in two years and caused a humanitarian catastrophe.

“Even prior to the war, the global recovery had already been decelerating alongside intensifying geopolitical tensions, continued COVID-19 flare-ups, diminishing macroeconomic support, and lingering supply bottlenecks,” it noted.  

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