Compared to previous projections, the change in forecast for 2021 is quite small, Gita Gopinath noted.
Washington:
There is evidence of normalization of economic activities in India, IMF chief economist Gita Gopinath said ahead of the annual spring meeting of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
On Tuesday, the IMF projected an impressive 12.5% growth rate for India in 2021, stronger than that of China, the only major economy to have a positive growth rate last year during the COVID pandemic. -19.
“The evidence we have obtained in recent months in terms of normalizing economic activity,” Gopinath said ahead of the IMF-World Bank’s annual spring meeting.
In its annual World Economic Outlook, the Washington-based global financial institution said India’s economy is expected to grow 6.9 percent in 2022.
In 2020, the Indian economy contracted by a record 8%.
However, compared to previous projections, the change in forecast for 2021 is quite small, Ms. Gopinath noted.
“In the case of India, we have a pretty small change. It’s a 1 percent increase for growth for 2021. It has happened with high frequency,” she said in response to a question. .
Malhar Nabar, division chief of the IMF’s research department, told reporters that the IMF’s current forecast for India already takes a fairly conservative view of the sequential growth of the Indian economy for this year.
“But it is true that with this very worrying increase in cases which pose very serious downside risks to the growth prospects of the economy,” Nabar said.
The global economy shrank 4.3% last year, more than two and a half times more than during the global financial crisis of 2009.
According to the Johns Hopkins University coronavirus tracker, COVID-19 has so far infected 131,707,267 people and killed 2,859,868 people around the world since it emerged in central China’s Wuhan city in 2019 .