After topping the list of emerging market (EM) economies for four straight months, India was dethroned by China in August, as weak stock market and currency performance offset the boost from robust GDP growth and manufacturing activity, Mint’s latest emerging market tracker showed. India slipped to second place with a composite score of 57.5, just behind China’s 58.4.
India was the worst performer among peers on both stock market capitalization and currency movement. Market capitalization fell 2.1% month-on-month, while the rupee depreciated 1.6% against the dollar. Even so, a strong GDP growth of 7.8% in April-June, a manufacturing purchasing managers’ index reading of 59.3, and export growth of 6.7% kept India ahead of most other EMs.
China edged past India thanks to steady GDP growth and stock market performance, a stable currency, and the strongest import cover among peers. This marked China’s first return to the top spot in five months. However, its climb owed more to India’s deteriorating performance than to significant improvements at home. China remains one of only two EM economies facing deflation—a clear sign of subdued demand and weak growth momentum.
Thailand left Indonesia behind to secure the third rank as its strong export growth and stock market performance outshone the deflationary trend and the weaknesses in GDP growth.
Launched in September 2019, Mint’s Emerging Markets Tracker provides a summary of economic activity across nine 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.
