JP Morgan: India's lowest growth in 5 years, 5.8%, worrying; recovery may be slow

Commenting on India’s January-March 2019 GDP growth, which "surprised sharply to the downside, printing at a 5-year low of 5.8%", JP Morgan, the American multinational investment bank and financial services company headquartered in New York City, has said that it has not just "dragged down full-year growth also to a five-year low of 6.8%".

It underlines, "The GDP undershoot reinforces the discernable slowdown that is currently underway. Growth has largely been flying on one engine in recent years – private consumption – and that has gotten progressively exhausted."
Worse, in its commentary, authored by Sajjid Z Chinoy and Toshi Jain, who are with the top MNC's Emerging Markets Asia Economic and Policy Research wing, say, even this is "buffeted by sustained rural distress and a significant tightening of financial conditions amongst the Non Bank Financial Companies (NBFC), which have largely been financing consumption."

Continue the JP Morgan experts, as for public investment, it suffers from "lack of fiscal space with the total public sector borrowing requirement rising to almost 9% of GDP", and while exports bounced back strongly in 2018-19, they "are likely to slow meaningfully as global uncertainty rises (especially after the US has opened up a second flank in its trade war) and global growth momentum slows."

Giving figures on how Gross Value Added in agriculture and industry have been going down over the last one year, JP Morgan predicts, "Slowing consumption growth at home along with a cloudy outlook for exports, creates the worrying prospect of some hysteresis and suggests growth is likely to recover only slowly in the coming quarters."

Did the Sabarmati riverfront make Ahmedabad more vulnerable?

Currently living in Los Angeles, I find myself missing Ahmedabad . Not because I miss living through the city's recent devastating floods—which, experts say, resulted from a combination of extreme meteorological events and chronic urban infrastructure bottlenecks—but because I am unable to make an on-the-spot assessment of the disaster.

Paradox of Stanford's Hoover Institute: Freedom from Communism, but freedom for whom?

A few days ago, we went to San Francisco, ordinarily a six-hour drive from Los Angeles. However, it took us more than eight hours because a fire had broken out on one of the mountains along the highway, forcing us to take another route, part of which ran along the seashore.

India’s growth story meets a stark wealth divide: billionaires gain as top 1% owns 40% of wealth

India’s rapid economic expansion is accompanied by an increasingly concentrated distribution of wealth, raising fresh questions over how fheadline GDP figures reflect the economic reality of ordinary Indians. A two yearold social-media post by former bureaucrat Anil Swarup , founder chairman of Nexus of Good , has resurrected a debate over the gap between India’s aggregate economic size and the wealth held by its richest citizens. Swarup argues that looking only at GDP per capita can obscure the extent to which wealth is concentrated among a small section of the population.

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