Economy
India drops to 6th among emerging market peers in August after ruling at pole position for months
Summary
India, which had been unbeatable in Mint’s emerging market league table since January, fell to sixth rank in August. What pulled India down so dramatically?
India dominated Mint’s Emerging Markets Tracker holding the top rank for seven consecutive months, but fell to sixth position in August despite strong economic growth, robust manufacturing activity and moderating inflation.
India had consistently held the top spot in the tracker for 15 out of 17 months between March 2023 and July 2024.
In August, Malaysia claimed the first position in the EM league table backed by superior currency growth relative to its emerging market peers, followed by The Philippines, which witnessed a strong stock market performance, and Thailand, which saw strong exports growth.
The massive decline in India’s ranking was mainly due to a 9.3% year-on-year contraction in export growth in August, while some of the higher-ranked countries saw strong growth.
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What also proved to be a massive drag on India was the stock market's performance amid global volatility due to the unwinding of yen carry trade and fears of a recession in the US.
The Indian stock market’s average monthly capitalization fell by 3.6%, while most other countries saw decent performance by their stock markets. India had benefited from strong stock market performance in the two months prior.
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 is 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.
