India growing “pretty robustly”: World Bank President predicts a strong global growth
Predicting a strong global growth by the end of the year, World Bank President Jim Kim asserted that the Indian economy is growing “pretty robustly”. Kim also called for more cooperation among the multilateral system, private sector and the government to make use of the positively growing situation.
Addressing the Bloomberg Global Business Forum, Kim said, “That dormant capital will earn a higher return, where the developing countries will have access to much more capital for the infrastructure needs, even for investing in health and education, investing in resilience to climate change and other factors.”
Further stating that the growth is more evenly distributed between India and along with it Japan, Europe and US, Kim said, “A country like India is growing, pretty robustly. Japan and Europe are growing in a more healthy way whereas the US continues to grow. It used to be that commodity importers were doing much better than commodity exporters. So the growth is relatively more evenly distributed.”
The World Bank President said that the bank, along with IMF was carefully watching the debt-to-GDP ratio of every country. Clearly mentioning that the World Bank won’t be providing financial support to countries facing real problems with over indebtedness, Kim said, “In Africa, the debt-to-GDP ratios are still very manageable…We would not be moving toward providing more financing for countries if we thought there was a real problem with over indebtedness in the countries. Because we follow this very closely, along with the IMF.”
“We think that there are tremendous opportunities for investment. But sometimes, purely based on perception, investors in sovereign wealth funds — I’ve heard them say, Africa is risky. Right, as if Africa was a single country. Africa’s not a single country and the risk profiles from country to country have enormous differences,” added Kim.