A third of the global economy will be in recession this year, the head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has warned.

Kristalina Georgieva said 2023 will be “tougher” than last year as the US, EU and China see their economies slow.

It comes as the war in Ukraine, rising prices, higher interest rates, and the spread of Covid in China weigh on the global economy.

In October the IMF cut its global economic growth outlook for 2023.

“We expect one-third of the world economy to be in recession,” Ms. Georgieva said on the CBS news program Face the Nation.

“Even countries that are not in recession, it would feel like a recession for hundreds of millions of people,” she added.

Katrina Ell, an economist at Moody’s Analytics in Sydney, gave the BBC her assessment of the world economy.

“While our baseline avoids a global recession over the next year, odds of one are uncomfortably high. Europe, however, will not escape recession and the US is teetering on the verge,” she said.

The IMF cut its outlook for global economic growth in 2023 in October, due to the war in Ukraine as well as higher interest rates as central banks around the world attempt to rein in rising prices.

Since then China has scrapped its zero-Covid policy and started to reopen its economy, even as coronavirus infections have spread rapidly in the country.

Ms. Georgieva warned that China, the world’s second-largest economy, would face a difficult start to 2023.

“For the next couple of months, it would be tough for China, and the impact on Chinese growth would be negative, the impact on the region will be negative, the impact on global growth will be negative,” she said.

The IMF is an international organization with 190 member countries. They work together to try to stabilize the global economy. One of its key roles is to act as an early economic warning system.

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Help with energy costs will be less generous from April, with bills for a typical household going up to £3,000.

However, there will be more support for the most vulnerable.

The assistance provided to businesses is also expected to reduce from March.

From April, some groups across the UK will receive cash payments to help with energy costs:

Further details will follow.

Under the current energy price guarantee, a household using a typical amount of gas and electricity will pay £2,500 annually.

The guarantee began in October and was originally meant to last for two years, before the government said it would end in April 2023.

Chancellor Jeremy Hunt then said the guarantee would continue, increasing by £500 to £3,000 from April.

Without government support, the average energy bill would have risen to £4,279 in January 2023, regulator Ofgem said.

Previously, Ofgem set the maximum suppliers could charge households per unit of energy.

But after prices soared in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the government announced its price guarantee would replace this energy cap.

A new scheme to support firms with their energy bills will be announced in the House of Commons on Monday.

The current scheme which caps the unit cost of gas and electricity for all businesses expires at the end of March.

It will be replaced with a new scheme that offers a discount on wholesale prices rather than a fixed price.

Very heavy energy-using sectors, such as steel, glass, and ceramics, are expected to get a larger discount than others, Treasury sources said.

Last week, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt told industry leaders that the current scheme to support businesses was “unsustainably expensive”.

The energy support scheme is mainly used by businesses but is also for charities and public sector organizations such as schools and hospitals.

Firms have been warning of a “cliff edge” when the current support stops at the end of March, and the new scheme is expected to run until March 2024 to avoid this.