India ends FY24 with a hat trick as No. 1 emerging market: Mint tracker

livemint.com:

Mint’s Emerging Markets Tracker provides a summary of economic activity across 10 large emerging markets based on seven high-frequency indicators. One of the original members of the list, Russia, has been temporarily dropped from the tracker since its trade data has not been reliably available for the last two years. A country’s score on a given metric is a measure of its distance from both the best performer and the worst performer.

The best performer gets a score of 100, and the worst performer gets zero. A country with a reading that is halfway between the two gets 50. The average of the scores of all seven indicators for a country gives its composite score.

India’s score for March was its lowest in four months, having exceeded 80 in both January and February. This dip was primarily due to poor stock market performance—worst among the EMs in the tracker (it looks at the month-on-month change in the average daily market capitalization in a month; India’s declined nearly 1%). Additionally, exports contracted for the first time in four months.

But India was still able to retain the top slot because of the manufacturing purchasing managers’ index (PMI), where it has had the best reading in the league table for 11 months on the trot, and it also has had the best GDP growth for four straight quarters. China climbed two spots to No. 2 with the lowest inflation rate among peers.

Its stock market performance was also the strongest among EM economies. The Philippines continued to hold the third spot with the highest exports growth and a relatively better import cover. The seven high-frequency indicators considered are real GDP growth, manufacturing PMI, export growth, retail inflation, import cover, exchange rate movement, and