Customers line up to buy fresh peppers at the Mile 12 food market in Lagos, Nigeria, on July 7. Soaring inflation could push 15 million more Nigerians into extreme poverty by the end of this year, the World Bank says.

Balcells, with Frontier Investment Management Partners, thinks the worst economic pain from the current economic downturn will be in smaller, highly indebted emerging market economies. He includes Ecuador, Ghana, Zambia and El Salvador on that list. Two larger nations — Pakistan and Turkey — are also at risk, he says. The IMF this week approved a billion dollar bailout to support Pakistan's floundering economy.

Another thing making 2022 different from global economic crises of the past is the role of China as a major lender. A significant portion of the debt now owed by low and middle-income countries is owed to Beijing.

"In terms of foreign debt, China is the elephant in the room," says Vasuki Shastry, an associate fellow with the global think tank Chatham House.

Unlike global debt crises of the 1980s, the lending side of the equation is now significantly different. There are now billions of dollars owed to China. Much of that debt has come as part of China's ambitious Belt and Road infrastructure program. The issue, Shastry says, is a lack of transparency around much of the lending by China. Some of it is labeled as commercial debt rather than sovereign debt even though it's owed to state-owned Chinese companies.

And negotiating debt relief with Beijing is novel territory not just for individual countries but for the broader international community. Traditionally, the IMF and the so-called Paris Club of wealthy nations play a significant role in restructuring distressed debt. But so far Beijing has preferred to deal with its borrowers on its own.

"China is essentially signaling that there are two tracks in terms of global debt negotiations," Shastry says. "One track is led by the OECD [the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development], which includes the U.S. and Europe, the traditional Paris Club. And China wants to be part of a separate track, where it alone wants to determine how it wants to deal with countries facing debt distress."

Another forum for emerging markets to hash out debt relief has been the Group of 20. But given that Russia is a member of the G-20, it's been nearly impossible since the February invasion of Ukraine to get the group's finance ministers to agree on a unified response to the growing global economic troubles.

A Ukrainian reconnaissance team trains near Mykolaiv in May. Claire Harbage/NPR hide caption