Gopinath: IMF may raise Indiaโ€™s growth forecast closer to 7%
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Gopinath: IMF may raise Indiaโ€™s growth forecast closer to 7%

New Delhi: The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is likely to raise Indiaโ€™s GDP growth forecast for the current fiscal year closer to 7%, former IMF deputy managing director Gita Gopinath said on Wednesday.โ€œThis Oct, IMF revised up Indiaโ€™s growth for 2025 to 6.6%. But that came in before the second quarter growth numbers came out. I expect they will move up to 7% the next time they come up with their numbers. India is actually doing better than was predicted before the crisis,โ€ said Gopinath, now a professor of economics at Harvard University.Several multilateral agencies, brokerages and economists have revised Indiaโ€™s GDP growth projections for 2025-26 after the 8.2% growth in the July-Sept quarter. She said the world has shown a lot of resilience since the tariffs were announced.โ€œDifferent parts of the world for different reasons. I believe artificial intelligence has been a big offset for tariffs around the world. The spending on it has supported growth everywhere,โ€ she said. โ€œI donโ€™t think the lesson to take away is that high levels of tariffs are not a problem for the world. They are consequential. And I would say that the next couple of years we will continue to see some of the drag from this geoeconomic environment that weโ€™re in,โ€ said Gopinath.She said at least from the US perspective, โ€œwe are past peak tariffsโ€ in the US for several reasons. โ€œThe important piece is that 2026 is a year of midterm elections in the US. I donโ€™t think thereโ€™s anybody who wants to have a lot of uncertainty in the run up to the elections,โ€ said Gopinath.She said tariffs have raised prices in the US & theyโ€™ve pushed up inflation by about 0.7 percentage points and the cost of living increase is a problem for affordability. โ€œSo that also dampens the incentive to raise tariffs further. There were important legal challenges to the tariffs in the US, which I think will also scale it down. So, from the US tariff perspective, I suspect we are, if not past the peak, but definitely close to the peak.โ€

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