Battle-scarred developing nations look for path out of permacrisis

By Andrea Shalal and Libby George

WASHINGTON, April 20 (Reuters) – Developing country policymakers left this week’s IMF-World Bank meetings more frustrated than ever that successive external shocks are derailing their efforts to tackle high debt, reform their economies and deliver better lives for millions of citizens now struggling to pay for food and fuel. 

But unlike the past, some officials and economists say this crisis could be the tipping point that drives countries to take more independent and regionally coordinated action.

The war, and the meteoric spikes it caused in oil and fertilizer prices, will weigh on global growth and drive up inflation, even if it ends soon, the IMF and World Bank said.

It also threatens to blow out the fiscal balances of countries that had just gotten back on track after debt default, such as Zambia and Sri Lanka. It is also eating into the buffers others built after the pandemic, the Russia-Ukraine war and then U.S. trade tariffs upended their economies. 

“It’s like you got hit in the head many times. Once you got up and then you got hit again,” Chayawadee Chai-anant, assistant governor of Thailand’s central bank, told Reuters, of efforts to bounce back from crises.

The IMF has lowered its 2026 growth forecast for emerging nations to 3.9% from 4.2% in January 2026, but those projections could worsen if the war persists. 

Reza Baqir, head of sovereign advisory services at Alvarez & Marsal, said countries making painful reforms, from debt restructuring to subsidy removal, are now left scrambling with fiscal balances destroyed by yet another crisis not of their making. 

“It’s a depressing mood, and it is also a repeated demonstration of the consequences on bystanders, where due to developments not of their own making, they have to deal with a severe economic crunch,” Baqir told Reuters. 

CRISIS RATHER THAN SOLUTIONS

Nigeria is one such example. In the past three years, it has removed costly fuel subsidies, eased foreign exchange rules and streamlined regulations to draw a slew of foreign investor cash.

“We find that we are doing all we can, and it is shock after shock, externally and exogenously created,” NIgerian Finance Minister Wale Edun told Reuters. “That sort of takes away from achievements and from our progress.”

Josh Lipsky, director of economic affairs at the Atlantic Council, said conversations with dozens of other financial leaders showed their patience was wearing thin.

“I sense the frustration they can’t actually deal with the big challenges they want to deal with. They want to talk debt. They want to talk about these things that define the decade but every meeting is just a crisis. And I’ve just felt a different sense this time of what’s next.”  

The IMF and World Bank, though, offered few solutions during the week; top leaders instead cautioned countries against using energy subsidies to shield citizens, while acknowledging that the latest hike in energy and food prices could well foment social unrest and outward migration.

IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva and said that 12 or more countries are seeking loans to help weather the shock, estimating demand of $20 billion to $50 billion, depending on the duration of the war.

The World Bank said countries could tap up to $25 billion in crisis response funds quickly, with up to $60 billion available over six months. Two days into the meetings, World Bank President Ajay Banga, clearly hearing urgent pleas for help, said the Bank could make up to $100 billion available by year’s end, if needed, by restructuring its balance sheet.

But neither the IMF nor the Group of 20 major economies, which had rushed to suspend debt service payments for the poorest countries in the early weeks of the COVID pandemic, offered any new instruments. 

BREAK THE CYCLE 

“What we saw this week was the Bank and the Fund effectively saying, ‘Don’t worry, we can do what we’ve done in the past,'” said Christina Segal-Knowles, a former senior White House official now with the Rockefeller Foundation. “But you have a set of countries that are still vulnerable. Those tools have not put these countries back in a place where they’re sustainable.”

The world needs, she said, something that “breaks the cycle because otherwise, the next shock that we get to will be back in the same place.”

Longer-term loans, larger-scale financing and different forms of financing that allow countries to escape the “debt trap,” are also options, she said. 

Edun, who also chairs the G-24 group of developing nations, called on the institutions to do more, but noted that amid drastic aid cuts and falling official development assistance, developing nations need to also focus on “self help, self reliance” and integration within regions, such as more trade on the African continent.

“I think the most important lesson is that there has to be a reliance on domestic resource mobilization within these countries,” he said during the G-24 panel. 

Throughout the week, officials from Africa, Asia and Latin America said leaders in their regions were looking to boost their resilience to future energy shocks by shifting resources into renewable energy and taking advantage of other resources such as critical minerals to boost growth and create jobs.       Albert Park, chief economist of the Asian Development Bank, said Asian economies were racing to protect themselves from the negative effects. Vietnam and Indonesia had already announced new investments in renewable energy and others would likely follow suit, he said.

But leaders are under pressure to act quickly, even as they look for lasting solutions. 

World Bank forecasts show that a prolonged war could push an additional 50 million people into acute food insecurity, with some 10-15 million jobs lost in the near term alone.

“The cushion has been quite low, because it’s never recovered back all the way, so it’s thinner and thinner and thinner…especially for the fragile people,” Thailand’s Chai-anant told Reuters. “That’s why this crisis, I think it’s going to be more widespread.”

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal and Libby George; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama )