Says India needs to grow by additional 1-1.5% to sustain wage hike and other benefits given to workers and the poor
New Delhi : Finance Minister Arun Jaitley today said that a good monsoon and good farm sector next financial year can help push economic growth up from the estimates of 7.0-7.5% for 2015-16 (Apr-Mar).
“India has never had three continuous bad monsoons…so hopefully if one factor improves it can add that cutting edge to what the present figures will be,” Jaitley said.
Jun-Sep monsoon rains, crucial for Indian agriculture, have been over 10% below normal for two consecutive years now. He said the global economy, poor farm sector growth and moderate performance of the private sector so far have been the downsides to India’s economic growth and the silver lining is the sharp fall in the global oil prices.
Oil prices have fallen nearly 60% in the past 18 months following a glut. The finance minister said that lower global oil prices have helped the government increase public investment. He said there are multiple engines in an economy that are required to push economic growth, however, India had only a few currently contributing to the GDP growth especially the increased public investment.
Jaitley says India needs to grow by additional 1-1.5 per cent so that it can sustain wage hike and other benefits given to workers and the poor.
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IMF: Global growth to be disappointing in 2016
Frankfurt: Global economic growth will be “disappointing and patchy” in 2016, the head of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde said. Rising interest rates in the United States, the economic slowdown in China, the persistent fragility of the financial system in a number of countries and the effects of low oil prices on producer countries “all mean that global growth in 2016 will be disappointing and patchy,” Lagarde wrote in an article.
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