India, which appears to have been pushed back to being the world’s sixth-biggest economy in 2020, will again overtake the UK to become the fifth largest in 2025 and race to the third spot by 2030, a think tank said on Saturday. India had overtaken the UK in 2019 to become the fifth-largest economy in the world but has been relegated to sixth spot in 2020.
“India has been knocked off course somewhat through the impact of the pandemic. As a result, after overtaking the UK in 2019, the UK overtakes India again in this year’s forecast and stays ahead till 2024 before India takes over again,” the Centre for Economics and Business Research said in an annual report.
The UK appears to have overtaken India again during 2020 as a result of the weakness of the rupee, it said. The CEBR forecasts that the Indian economy will expand by nine percent in 2021 and by seven percent in 2022.
“Growth will naturally slow as India becomes more economically developed, with the annual GDP growth expected to sink to 5.8 percent in 2035, “This growth trajectory will see India become the world’s third-largest economy by 2030, overtaking the UK in 2025, Germany in 2027, and Japan in 2030,” it said.
The UK-based think tank forecast that China will overtake the US to become the world’s biggest economy in 2028, five years earlier than previously estimated due to the contrasting recoveries of the two countries from the COVID-19 pandemic.
The rate of GDP growth sank to a more than the ten-year low of 4.2 percent in 2019, down from 6.1 percent the previous year and around half the 8.3 percent growth rate recorded in 2016. “Slowing growth has been a consequence of a confluence of factors including fragility in the banking system, adjustment to reforms, and a deceleration of global trade,” it said.
While this is the highest death toll outside of the US in absolute terms, it equates to around 10 deaths per 100,000, which is a significantly lower figure than has been seen in much of Europe and the Americas.