“We face a potential confluence of calamities,” IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said in a statement.
She warned that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has “compounded” the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, weighing on the economic recovery and fanning inflation as the cost of food and fuel jumps.
And then there’s climate change.
The head of the International Energy Agency urged countries to make the right investment choices in response to the fossil fuel shortages triggered by Russia’s attack on Ukraine.
“Some people may well use Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as an excuse for … a new wave of fossil fuel investments,” IEA chief Fatih Birol said during a discussion in Davos. “It will forever close the door to reaching our climate targets.”
The scale of the economic challenge was underscored by a new report from the OECD on Monday, showing that the combined GDP of the G7 countries shrank by 0.1% in the first quarter of the year, compared with the previous three-month period.
To limit economic stress, the IMF is calling for government officials and business leaders meeting in Davos to discuss lowering trade barriers.
But as countries battle growing dismay about the cost-of-living crisis at home, some are heading in the opposite direction, implementing restrictions on trade in food and agricultural products that can exacerbate shortages and push up prices globally.
Speaking during a visit to Tokyo, President Joe Biden said Monday that a recession was not inevitable and he reiterated that the White House was considering removing some Trump-era tariffs on Chinese goods, which Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has said do more harm than good for American consumers and businesses.
Meanwhile, China could see its economy shrink this quarter because of the impact of Covid-19 lockdowns in Shanghai, Bejiing and dozens of other cities, and the fallout of a real estate crisis. The country’s central bank delivered the biggest cut on record on Friday to a key interest rate after housing sales collapsed.
Zhu Ning, a professor at the Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance, said he believed that authorities still had ample options to tackle the series of challenges facing the world’s second biggest economy.
“China still has a lot of room if it wants to — to lower interest rate, to give monetary stimulus to the economy,” he said.
— Anna Cooban, Michelle Toh, Mark Thompson and Allie Malloy contributed to this article.