While the overall emerging market economies (EMEs) are on an upward trend, India has not managed to be a part of the emerging market growth, said Chief Emerging Markets Economist at JP Morgan Jahangir Aziz.
“If you look at emerging market economies overall, since around 2013-14 they had been on a downward trend across the world and then from around the first quarter of 2016 almost all EMEs have been moving up,” Aziz told BTVi in an interview.
“The disturbing part is that India is now slowing when the rest of the emerging market world is picking up, which means that the drivers of emerging market growth, which is a pick-up in global trade, India is not a part of this pick-up,” said Aziz.
According to Aziz, there was excess capacity in manufacturing globally and India, in addition to being a manufacturer, had to become a consumer.
“In a world with that kind of excess capacity in manufacturing, it is very hard to see how things like turning into a manufacturing hub is going to work out. When the global trade pie is shrinking or stagnating, it is very difficult to start taking away market share,” said Aziz.
“India is a large enough country that will have to change and become, at some point of time, consumers of things, at the same time as being investors or producers of things… There has to be a global view that we need to rely or move away from over dependence on external demand to domestic demand,” he added.