India outshines emerging market peers again in July, shows Mint’s EM tracker

India retained its top position in Mint's Emerging Markets tracker for the eighth consecutive month in July, bolstered by a robust stock market performance. The monthly stock market capitalization surged by 4.6%, while a strong manufacturing Purchasing Managers' Index (PMI) and easing inflation further solidified India's lead. Indonesia was the only other country with a better stock market performance, but a contraction in its manufacturing sector pulled its overall score down. India's composite score for July stood at 81.

Indonesia moved up two spots to secure second place in July, overtaking China, driven by a 6.4% increase in its average monthly capitalization and significant growth in exports. Indonesia achieved a composite score of 68.

Also read: India’s retail inflation eases to 3.54% in July, lowest in five years

Meanwhile, Brazil surged four positions to claim third place in the EM league table, fueled by robust exports and strong manufacturing activity. Notably, Brazil also had the highest import cover among its peers.

Also read: IMF hikes India’s FY25 GDP estimate by 20 bps to 7%

Launched in September 2019, Mint’s Emerging Markets Tracker provides a summary of economic activity across 10 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 and will be updated as the latest data becomes 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.