Exclusive | India responsible for 80% of slashed global growth estimate

As the International Monetary Fund (IMF) cut down global growth forecasts owing to the economic slowdown in India and other emerging markets, the chief economist of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Gita Gopinath said that India was primarily responsible for the downgrade in global growth.

India Today News Director Rahul Kanwal spoke to Gita Gopinath at the ongoing 50th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos.

Speaking about the lowered world growth estimates, Gopinath said, "We have projected global growth at 2.9 percent for 2019 and 3.3 percent for 2020 which is 0.1 percentage point lower than the October estimates. The vast majority of it comes from our downgrade for India which was quite significant for both years."

When asked the extent to which the economic slowdown in India had impacted global forecasts, Gita Gopinath said, "Simple calculation says it would be over 80 percent."The IMF on Monday also lowered India's economic growth estimate for the current fiscal to 4.8 percent. When asked about the slashed projections, Gita Gopinath said, "The first two-quarters of India came in weaker than we projected. One sector where we are seeing the most stress is the financial sector -- the non-bank financial corporations. We have seen a sharp decline in credit growth and a weakened business sentiment. All this led to the revised numbers."

However, India's growth (estimated at 4.8 percent in 2019) is projected to improve to 5.8 percent in 2020 and 6.5 percent in 2021.

Talking about the road to recovery for India's economy, Gita Gopinath added, "We see India recovering. There is a significant recovery coming in the next fiscal year. There is a fair amount of monetary stimulus in the system, corporate tax cuts are also there -- these should help with recovery in growth."

According to Gopinath, the biggest task before the government is to restimulate growth without furthering the non-performing assets (NPAs) problem.

"The most major issue to address is the weakness in credit growth. There need to be policies that can resuscitate credit growth but at the same time don't create further NPA problems, that is the first step. There needs to be a quicker recapitalization of banks," she said.