WB expects India to inch closer to China in growth rate

The World Bank had yesterday released its latest issue of Global Economic Prospects 2013, in which the economies of developing countries like India, China and Brazil are projected to be recovering and higher growth rate.

The World Bank expects that by 2015, the growth rate of China would be 7.9 per cent and that of India 7 per cent, World Bank Chief Economist Kaushik Basu told reporters during a conference call.

He added that the gap between the two Asian giants closes.

"We do expect India to inch closer to China and for a very, very good reason--not an analysis of what's happened over the last one year or two years, but a bit of a sweep of history," he said.

While the growth of the world economy growth is projected to inch up from 2.3 per cent in 2012 to 2.4 per cent in 2013, with the high-income countries remaining at the same level of growth of 1.3 per cent in both 2012 and 2013, it is the emerging markets like India, China and Brazil that would show significant signs of recovery.

"Growth in Brazil had gone down quite sharply in 2012 of 0.9. We at the World Bank are expecting Brazil to make a recovery to 3.

4 per cent in 2013. We are expecting recovery in the case of China from 7.9 per cent growth in 2012 to 8.4 per cent in 2013.

"We are expecting a recovery in India from 5.1 per cent growth in 2012 to 6.1 per cent growth in 2013," Basu said.

"China is growing at a phenomenal rate right from 1978 or 1980 and you can't grow at 10 per cent for more than a couple of decades.

"China has done it for 30 years and this has been expected in China and expected by us that China will continue to grow very rapidly but it will probably come down from these great highs," Basu said.

"If it comes down to 7.9 per cent...I think not. India was growing from 2003 to 2008 at close to nine per cent per annum, with the last couple of years actually over nine per cent, and we expect that India, having taken off only about 10 years ago, to have some still to go.

"So, there is going to be a catch-up of India's growth getting closer to China's growth and, who knows, a couple of years down that road, they may be completely neck to neck," Basu said in response to a question.

Basu said the next one or three years will remain difficult as structural reforms are put in place primarily in the euro zone countries, but even elsewhere in the world.