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Washington - The conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East and the Ebola outbreak in West Africa pose serious risks to the global economy, warned International Monetary Fund (IMF) chief Christine Lagarde on Thursday.
Those geopolitical risks, in economic parlance, are already causing "immense human suffering," Lagarde said.
The conflict in eastern Ukraine, which has already sent both the Ukrainian and Russian economies reeling, could disrupt commodity prices and financial markets, she said.
Lagarde, speaking ahead of next week's annual meetings of the Washington-based crisis lender and its sister institution, the development-lending World Bank, has warned about the conflicts in the past.
She raised new concern about the Ebola outbreak.
"If it is not contained - if all the players that talk about it don't actually do something about it...it might develop into something that could cause very serious concerns," Lagarde said.
The United Nations is still waiting for donor governments to fulfil the call for $1bn to treat and isolate patients to halt the spread in West Africa, where at least 3 300 people have already died of Ebola, by World Health Organisation counts.
The IMF has provided $130m in emergency financial assistance to Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, which have been hardest hit.
The IMF's quarterly revisions to its forecasts for economic growth are due on Tuesday.
"The global economy is weaker than we had hoped only six months ago," Lagarde said.
"The outlook for potential growth has been pared down."
In July, IMF economists trimmed their forecast for 2014 global growth to 3.4%, down 0.3% points from the April outlook. Advanced economies weighed most on the reduced outlook, but the IMF also predicted slowing growth in emerging and developing markets.
Emerging and developing countries have accounted for more than 80% of world growth since 2008, Lagarde said. Those same economies, especially China, are likely to continue fuelling global growth but at "a slower pace than before," she said.
Lagarde warned against a "new mediocre" as especially advanced economies face a "risk of low growth for a long time."
Low inflation and high unemployment, which plague the euro area in particular, can feed a self-reinforcing cycle of weakness.
"If you expect growth to be low and lower ... you're going to refrain from investing in new capital expend, you're going to refrain from consuming, possibly," Lagarde said.
The United States and Britain are "clearly leading the charge" among advanced economies, Japanese growth is more modest and economies are "weakest in the euro area," she said.
For the poorest countries, economic prospects are mostly improving.
In too many countries, large debt loads on both governments and the private sector and high unemployment remain the "legacies" of the 2008 financial crisis.
"Six years after the financial crisis, we continue to see weakness in the global economy," Lagarde said. "Countries are still dealing with the legacies of the crisis."
