Singapore:
World Bank President Jim Young Kim has said that India is expected to have a good third quarter, which is in line with Finance Minister P. Chidambaram’s observations that the country’s economy is now picking up.
“If you look at some of the biggest countries, it looks like India is going to have a good third quarter,” Kim said at Wall Street Journal CEO Forum meeting.
He was responding to questions on slowed growth in developing countries.
“China came in at an annualised rate of 9.3 per cent in the third quarter. And you know, there are all kinds of downside risks the biggest one being what’s going to happen here in this country when February rolls around.
“But we think that, over the next year, growth in the emerging markets is going to be over 5 per cent, and we think that’s going to continue,” the World Bank President said.
Last week, Chidambaram had exuded confidence that the economy will pick up in the second half and record a growth of 5-5.5 per cent in 2013-14.
“I am confident that the greenshoots that are visible here and there will multiply and that the economy will revive.
There will be an upturn in the second half of this year,” Chidambaram had said in an address to bankers at Bancon 2013 in Mumbai.
“It’s quite possible that the estimates made by the Reserve Bank or the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council or the Government about growth being between 5 and 5.5 per cent will be realised,” he had said.
However, the World Bank President acknowledged that the developing countries are unlikely to go back to the 10 plus growth rate which was experienced before the economic recession in the US.
“You’re not going to see, I don’t think, the 10-plus per cent growth rate that you saw prior to 2008, but you know, a lot of the fundamentals in these countries are in much, much better shape than we even knew.
In 2008, we thought that Africa was going to go off the deep end with the financial crisis, but then kept a 5-plus per cent growth rate all the way through,” he said.
