India’s economy scored higher in May riding cars and tractors: Mint tracker

These are the findings of the latest Mint macro tracker, which provides a monthly comprehensive report on the state of the economy, based on trends in 16 high-frequency indicators. The tracker has been running since October 2018.

For each indicator, the value in each month is assigned a colour coding (red, amber and green) to denote where it lies relative to the five-year average (red denotes worse, amber denotes it is in line with the average range, and green denotes better).

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The better performance in May was mainly on account of improvement in domestic passenger vehicle and tractor sales, which moved out of the red into the amber zone. 

While the rupee remained flat against the US dollar, it still saw an improvement from last month when the Indian currency depreciated 0.4%. The indicators that continued to be in the red were domestic air passenger growth, import cover, broadband subscriber base, and trade deficit.

Also read | Auto firms piggyback on tractors’ success

In another tracker run by Mint (Emerging Markets Tracker), India has maintained its position as the best-performing emerging market economy helped by a strong GDP growth.

Also read | India continues to shine among emerging market peers: Mint tracker

Methodology note: While calculating the five-year average, data for some indicators for April-May 2020 and April-May 2021 have been removed to eliminate lockdown-induced skews in the trend. However, the five-year averages may still show high figures due to sustained base effect in several indicators in 2021 and 2022.

Monthly standings will get updated retrospectively as more data comes in.

For inflation, the red/green coding is reversed.

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