New York: Trade agency UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) has projected India’s growth rate for the current year to slowdown at 6 per cent from last year’s 7.4 per cent, but the country will be the world’s second fastest growing economy, lagging by just a tiny fraction behind China.
The Trade and Development Report 2019 released by UNCTAD in Geneva maps a global slowdown with the world growth rate dropping from 3 per cent in 2018 to a projected 2.3 this year.
China with a 6.1 per cent growth rate for 2019 reclaims the title of the world’s fastest growing economy by being ahead of India by just 0.1 per cent. The next global report that will look at growth rates across the world will be the World Economic Outlook from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) expected next month.
The UNCTAD report said that the slowdown in India “continues a decelerating trend which began four years ago”. “Growth projections for India have been marked down, because of a sharp fall to 5.8 per cent in the first quarter of 2019 (relative to the corresponding quarter of the previous year),” it said.
The report noted that in Asia, the two economies that were among the fastest growing in the world, China and India are showing signs of a loss of growth momentum. The volume of India’s exports that grew by 6.6 per cent in 2017, slowed down to 4.3 per cent last year, according to the report. The rate of growth of imports showed a much bigger drop, from 11.7 per cent to 3.1 per cent during the same period.