India climbs to second position in emerging markets tracker, led by strong export growth

India's economic performance improved significantly among emerging markets’ (EM) peers, driven by a remarkable rebound in exports. 

Despite a tumultuous stock market and the depreciation of the rupee, the country's growth was fuelled by a 17% year-on-year increase in exports in October, marking a sharp recovery after months of sluggish performance.

India secured the second rank last month, steadily improving its position from sixth in August, showed the latest Mint's emerging markets tracker.

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China reclaimed the first position after a gap of 18 months in October, with its currency and stock market performance best among the peers, bolstered by the country’s economic revival package towards the end of September.

In India, while gross domestic product (GDP), purchasing managers’ index (PMI) have been doing consistently well, exports growth gave the much needed boost in October. 

Exports grew 17% year-on-year in October, as opposed to contraction or tepid growth in the previous four months. Even though the rupee depreciated, its performance was better than currencies of most EM peers.

Meanwhile, Thailand slipped to third rank from first position as its stock market performance paled compared to China, despite recording an increase in its stock market capitalisation. Slight deterioration in PMI and exports growth also pulled its ranking down.

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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 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.