Economy
India continues to shine among emerging market peers: Mint tracker
Summary
India retained the top spot in the emerging markets league table as its GDP growth in the March quarter eclipsed that of other nations.The Indian economy continues to rule atop in Mint's emerging markets (EM) tracker. With a composite score of 70 out of a maximum possible score of 100, India retained its top spot for the sixth straight month in May. In fact, India has maintained the first position for 13 out of the previous 15 months—except for April and November last year, when India had slipped to second place.
India's robust performance comes on back of strong GDP growth of 7.8% for the March quarter, which outshone its emerging economy peers. Further boost came from the consistently strong purchasing managers’ index (PMI) in the manufacturing sector. The indicator has had the best reading in the rankings since May 2022. Exports also witnessed a decent growth of 9.1% in May this year, as compared with a 1.1% rise in April. The stock market showed a fairly decent performance, with its average market capitalization rising 2.1% in May.
Also read: Shining GDP overshadows slower GVA: Decoding growth numbers in 7 charts
With a composite score of 57, China continued to retain the second position for the third straight month. It had the lowest inflation figure of 0.3% among the other emerging peers in Mint's EM tracker. The country also saw a decent GDP growth figure in the March quarter.
Also read: India ends FY24 with a hat trick as No. 1 emerging market: Mint tracker
Malaysia climbed up two places to the third position with a composite score of 55, helped by a superior currency growth relative to its emerging market peers. The Malaysian ringgit's daily average for the month grew by 1.1%. Its stock market performance was also one of the strongest among peers, second to that of Turkey's.
Also read: India's retail inflation eases to 4.75% in May
All other currencies in the list showed a decent performance against the US dollar. While the Indian rupee's and the Mexican peso's growth were flat, the Philippine peso, the Indonesian rupiah, and the Brazilian real declined.
Even though India has topped the league table, its composite score dropped from 77.6 in April to 70 in May, indicating possible challenges in the months to come.
Launched in September 2019, Mint’s Emerging Markets Tracker provides a summary of economic activity across 10 large emerging markets based on seven high-frequency indicators—real GDP growth, manufacturing PMI, export growth, retail inflation, import cover, exchange rate movement, and stock market.
The rankings are provisional as the scores will be updated once all the latest data are available.
Methodology note: The tracker is a monthly summary of economic activity across nine large emerging markets based on seven high-frequency indicators. Latest available data is used.
On each indicator, the best-performing economy gets a score of 100, the worst one gets zero, and the others get linearly interpolated relative scores. A country's composite index score is the simple average of its seven indicator scores.
Earlier, the tracker had a 10th country, Russia, but it has been dropped temporarily as some data has not been reliably available since the Ukraine war began.
