News to note- IMF says India only key nation with double-digit growth in FY22!

New Delhi, January 27: The Indian economy will stage a strong rebound and grow as much as 11.5 per cent on year in FY22, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said on Wednesday, revising up its earlier forecast of an 8.8 per cent expansion.

 

With this, India will emerge as the only key nation to record a double-digit growth and reclaim the status of the world’s fastest-growing major economy, it added. India’s real gross domestic product (GDP) shrank as much as 8 per cent in FY21 due to the Covid-19 pandemic. In FY23, the economy will likely grow 6.8 per cent, the multilateral body said.

 

 

In its latest World Economic Outlook Update, released Wednesday, the IMF predicted that China would grow 8.1 per cent in 2021, followed by Spain (5.9 per cent) and France (5.5 per cent). China, which was the only major country to register a growth rate of 2.3 per cent in 2020, will expand 5.6 per cent in 2022, the IMF said.

 

 

Last October, it had projected an 8.8 per cent real GDP growth for India in FY22, highest globally. For the current fiscal, however, the IMF had forecast a record 10.3 per cent contraction. IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva this month said India “actually has taken very decisive action, very decisive steps to deal with the pandemic and to deal with the economic consequences of it”.

 

 

“What we see is that transition, combined with policy support, seems to have worked well. Why? Because if you look at mobility indicators, we are almost where we were before Covid in India, meaning that economic activities

have been revitalized quite significantly,” Georgieva had said.

 

 

The Finance Ministry had also exuded confidence that India would recover at a fast pace and reach pre-Covid levels by the end of this fiscal unless a second wave of cases was triggered by a fatigue with social distancing.

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