India retained top spot among EMs in May, but Thailand offered stiff competition
India retained the top position in Mint's Emerging Markets Tracker for the second consecutive month in May, but with its lead significantly narrowed. While India scored 67 (out of 100) in the tracker's composite score, Thailand was a close second at 66.6.
India's top rank was due to its fastest GDP growth and strongest manufacturing activity among emerging markets, and continued gains in the stock market. However, it lost its margin compared to April, when it scored 87.9 and the Philippines came second at 68.2. This was due to deteriorating export growth, currency movement and a lower stock market capitalisation.
Also read: Israel-Iran conflict threatens India's agri exports
Thai challenge
Meanwhile, Thailand jumped three places to second by recording the best export performance among EM counties and seeing a substantial improvement in its stock market performance.
Malaysia retained the third spot, supported by a strong currency. Export growth remained strong and inflation stayed stable.
Also read: Hormuz heat rises: Can India weather an oil shock?
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.
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 country's composite index score is the simple average of its seven indicator scores.
Earlier, the tracker had a 10th country, Russia, but it has been dropped temporarily as some data has not been reliably available since the Ukraine war began.
Also read: What global central banks are signalling about the road ahead
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