Economy
India slips to sixth rank among emerging market peers in Feb as stocks, rupee tumble
Summary
- India has been struggling compared to its emerging market peers, at least since the stock market rout began. Along with depreciating rupee and subdued exports, India’s position has weakened severely.
India slipped by three ranks to the sixth position in the Mint’s Emerging Markets Tracker in February as stock market rout, sharp depreciation in rupee and a slump in exports overshadowed strong GDP growth and Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI).
On the other hand, Brazil claimed the top rank for the first time since November 2023, as it outshone all other emerging markets in its currency performance and performed second-best in stock market capitalization. The Brazilian real posted a 4.5% month-on-month appreciation, and its stock market also recouped the losses posted in the previous month.
China secured the second rank, climbing three positions, due to a decent GDP growth, soft inflation print and a fairly strong stock market performance. Its import cover was the best among peers.
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Thailand broke into the top three after a gap of four months as its stock market saw the highest gains coupled with steady exports growth. A poor manufacturing PMI, however, proved to be a drag.
In India, the stock market’s average monthly capitalization fell by 14.6% month-on-month and exports declined nearly 11% year-on-year, dragging its ranking down. Even though the rupee depreciated at a slower rate, it was one of the worst performing EM currencies in February.
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 get updated once all 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.
