NEW DELHI: India and China will together account for about half of global growth this year, underscoring Asia’s increasing heft in the world economy, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
The Washington-based fund is now forecasting growth in the Asia Pacific region will come in at 4.6 per cent this year, some 0.3 percentage points higher than expected in October, and faster than the 3.8 per cent last year.
The region as a whole will contribute over 70 per cent of global growth this year, the IMF estimates. Projections presented by it in its World Economic Outlook report for April suggest that India’s real GDP growth rate is expected to surpass that of both the US and China.
India’s real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is expected to grow by 5.9 per cent in the financial year 2023-24 and by 6.3 per cent in the following fiscal year.
China’s real GDP is projected to grow by 5.2 per cent in 2023 and by 4.5 per cent in 2024. For the US, on the other hand, the projections for 2023 and 2024 stood at a meagre 1.6 per cent and 1.1 per cent.
Kristalina Georgieva Managing Diorector, IMF
India has not only outperformed the US and China, but it is also doing far better than the global forecasts. IMF has predicted that global economic growth will fall from 3.4 per cent in 2022 to 2.8 per cent in 2023. It will finally settle at 3 per cent in 2024. Advanced economies are expected to perform even worse. For these countries, mainly concentrated in Western Europe and North America, growth is expected to slow down from 2.7 per cent in 2022 to 1.3 per cent in 2023. In 2024, their growth rate is expected to settle at 1.4 per cent.
According to IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva, the world economy would continue to see a sharp slowdown against the backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic and the aftermath of the Russia-Ukraine conflict and is expected to grow at less than 3 per cent in 2023.
