India begins FY25 on a strong note as top emerging market: Mint tracker

livemint.com:

Mint tracker, continuing its trend from the previous year. With a composite score of 84, out of a maximum possible score of 100, India topped the EM league table in April with a persistently strong purchasing managers’ index (PMI) in the manufacturing sector, where it has had the best reading in the rankings for 12 months in a row—and in all but three months since November 2021. All currencies in the list saw a decline against the US dollar in April.

However, the decline was fairly contained for the Indian rupee, whose daily average for the month was lower by just 0.4% in April, bettered only by the Mexican peso. The stock market gained 3.1% in market capitalization, also one of the best among EM peers. China, with a composite score of 62, retained second place.

Brazil climbed four places to the third spot with the highest export growth and import cover in April. India has been a top performer among other EM economies in the monthly tracker consistently for the last three fiscal years. Launched in September 2019, Mint’s Emerging Markets Tracker provides a summary of economic activity across 10 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 capitalization.

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