India slides to 7th largest GDP

Hyderabad: The euphoria about India beating its colonial master Britain and France has died down within two years as Britain’s pound sterling crawl back to a respectable level after its Brexit woes, and India’s rupee fell steeply in the last few months.

According to a report of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Indian economy is now the seventh largest in the world — the rank that the country had had two years when the British shook the European economy with their shockingly unexpected choice to leave the European Union.

After 2016, India had relegated the UK and France to lower ranks. But after an interregnum of two years, both the UK and France have got their pre-2016 position of being fifth and sixth largest economies, respectively.

The factors that determines the place of the UK, France and India is in a musical chairs sort of play is their currency value and obviously its economic output. While it would take a great amount of time to increase the economic output of a country, an increase or decrease in the value of currency could push up or pull down the country from its global rankings easily.

Apart from stable oil prices and faster economic growth, India was helped crises in weaker pound and euro to go up the global economic peeking order — in the process  shaming the global colonial masters of yesteryears. But as the EU and British recovered, their currencies gained strength to reoccupy their past positions. India had a tough time as the rupee became the worst performing currency in the world due to strengthening dollar and rising crude prices.

The IMF report claims that “the United Kingdom is fifth largest economy with $2.81 trillion, and France is sixth with $2.79 trillion.”

Close behind France is India, the seventh largest economy worth $2.69 trillion, which is just $100 billion less than French economy.

However, there is nothing to lose heart. The international lending agencies like the World Bank and the IMF continue to be bullish about the prospects of India to overtake Britain and France next year.

In the next five years, the IMF predicts India would become a $4.33 trillion economy at the fifth rank. Followed by France with $3.36 trillion and the UK at $3.26 trillion  — with an almost a trillion dollar gap which is nearly difficult to bridge so
easily.

This would leave only four countries whose economies are bigger than India — the United States at the top, followed by China, Japan and Germany.