India has been growing pretty “robustly”, World Bank President Jim Kim has said predicting a strong global growth this year.
Speaking at the Bloomberg Global Business Forum meeting on Wednesday, Kim also called for more cooperation among the multilateral system, private sector and the governments to take advantage of the current win-win situation.
“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,” Kim said.
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He said that Japan, Europe and the US along with India were growing and there was a levelling-out in developing countries.
“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,” Kim said.
He said in terms of indebtedness, the bank was watching very carefully the debt-to-GDP ratios of every single country.
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“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,” he said.
“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,” he said.