Akash Jha
World Bank President Ajay Banga is bullish about India, and said he is more optimistic about the economy’s growth prospects now than he has been “in a long time”.
On the 17th of July, in Gandhinagar, on the margins of the third meeting of G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors, Banga indicated that he is a “big fan” of India’s digital payments infrastructure.
Banga told reporters, “I am more optimistic about India today as a whole than I have been in a long time.”
A GDP growth report of 6.1% for January-March brought the annualised rate for 2022-23 to 7.2 percent, making the Indian economy the world’s fastest growing major economy. The government of India and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) remain optimistic, expecting the economy to grow by 6.5 percent this year, despite the fact that some experts predict growth would decline drastically to under 6 percent in 2023-24 due to declining global growth prospects.
The global economy is in a “difficult place,” as Banga, the new President of the World Bank, said in early June.
It has done better than expected, but that doesn’t mean new difficulties won’t arise. According to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, things are expected to get more difficult in the coming year.
His optimistic words were, “forecast is not equal to destiny.”
The future is not predetermined. We should be considering just that at the moment.
The International Monetary Fund lowered its global growth prediction for 2023 and 2024 by 10 basis points each in April, to 2.8% and 3%, respectively.
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In its World Economic Outlook report, the IMF had said, “Tentative signs in early 2023 that the world economy could achieve a soft landing – with inflation coming down and growth steady – have receded amid stubbornly high inflation and recent financial sector turmoil,” referring to the failure of regional banks in the United States and the takeover of Credit Suisse by UBS in Switzerland.
Meanwhile, the World Bank predicts that international trade would increase by 2.1% in 2023.
