(Credit Alexander Farnsworth/iStock by Getty Images)
Countries face vastly different exposure to higher oil prices and supply uncertainty, shaped by whether they import or export, and how much policy space they have to respond
April 22, 2026/IMFBlog
By Carlos Guevara, Andrew Mayeda, Ken Nakagawa, Andrew Stanley
The war in the Middle East has disrupted oil and gas flows and darkened the global economic outlook. But the impact is far from even. As Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva showed in her Spring Meetings curtain-raiser speech, countries able to export oil and gas undisturbed face the smallest headwinds. Those directly hit by the conflict, including major oil and gas exporters in the Middle East, bear the brunt of the impact. So do oil-importing nations where imports loom large as a share of gross domestic product. How severe that burden becomes for these importers depends critically on their policy space, proxied in the charts below by their sovereign credit ratings.
The net oil importers in that bottom-left quadrant of vulnerability, with the least room to maneuver, were central to discussions at the Spring Meetings last week.
—This blog draws on IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva’s curtain-raiser speech, “Cushioning the Middle East War Shock,” on April 9, 2026.
