India has slipped down to the 7th place in the World Bank's global GDP rankings of 2018. According to the 2017 World Bank report, India had become the fifth largest economy, displacing the United Kingdom and France.
According to the report, India’s GDP for 2018 was $ 2,726,322.62 million ($2.67 trillion). The United States remains the top economy with a GDP of $20.5 trillion in 2018. China was the second largest economy with $13.6 trillion, while Japan took the third place with $5 trillion. The UK and France were at $2.8 trillion.
Many economists attribute the fall in rankings to the currency fluctuations and slowdown in consumption demand.
The new data has come when there were talks of India overtaking Japan by 2025. However, according to the World Bank data for 2018, Japan’s economic size was $4.97 trillion in 2018, higher than India’s by $2.24 trillion. Last month, research firm IHS Markit had said that India will overtake the UK as the fifth largest economy in the world in 2019 and is likely to shoot past Japan to emerge as the third-largest economy by 2025.
also read
- India's GDP growth likely to remain strong next year, but external factors like trade tariffs to weigh
- Is the India job market improving? Here is what govt data says
- India posts negative wholesale inflation for Nov on cheaper food, oil, fuel: Provisional govt data
- RBI cuts repo rate by 25bps to 5.25%, lifts GDP growth outlook to 7.3%
Narendra Modi government in its second-term has unveiled a plan to increase India's economic size to $5 trillion by 2024-25. To achieve this goal, the Economic Survey for 2018-19 estimated that India would have to grow by 12 per cent at current prices a year. Assuming the Reserve Bank of India’s inflation growth projections of 4 per cent, the Survey said the economy needed to grow 8 per cent at constant prices a year to make this target possible.
Recently, industry doyen and the non-executive chairman of the engineering giant L&T A.M. Naik went public with concerns over the economy, saying we should feel "lucky" even if the GDP clips at 6.5 per cent. "Growth is going to be not more than 6.5 per cent this year. My feeling is that though they (government) claim it is 7 per cent plus, if we can maintain 6.5 per cent, we will be lucky," Naik said.
Meanwhile, the growth of eight core industries dropped to 0.2 per cent in June, 2019. The government also revised downwards the growth rate of these eight sectors for May to 4.3 per cent from the earlier estimate of 5.1 per cent.
