India secured the second rank in Mint’s Emerging Markets (EM) Tracker for September, losing the top position to China as a weak rupee and subdued stock market outweighed strength in GDP growth and manufacturing activity. China secured the top position, supported by strong stock market gains, solid export growth and robust import cover.
India scored 69 on the composite index (the overall performance based on seven high-frequency indicators), behind China’s 78. The rupee weakened 0.8% month-on-month, while stock market capitalization rose only 0.5%, trailing most emerging market peers.
Still, the economy remained one of the strongest in the group, with 7.8% GDP growth recorded in the June quarter and a manufacturing PMI of 57.7 in the previous month. Exports grew 6.7% and import cover stood at 11.5 months, reflecting decent performance.
China, with a 5.9% month-on-month increase in stock market capitalization, 8.3% growth in exports, an import cover of 15.8 months, and an over 5% growth in GDP in the June quarter, left others on the tracker behind.
Brazil secured the third rank, supported by the strongest currency performance among EM peers. Its stock market and export growth also recorded sharp year-on-year gains compared to the previous month.
Launched in September 2019, Mint’s Emerging Markets Tracker provides a summary of economic activity across nine 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.