New Delhi: Dismissing US President Donald Trump’s “dead economy” jibe, 16th Finance Commission Chairman Arvind Panagariya on Friday said the Indian economy is growing at 7 per cent, and more than that in dollar terms.
Panagariya was speaking at the Business Today India@100 event.
“You don’t grow at 7 per cent plus (if the economy is dead), and actually in dollar terms we are growing at more than 7 per cent. I don’t know what the definition (of dead economy) means. May be, dead bodies do move,” he said when asked if India is a dead economy.
Asked about India’s trade protectionism, Panagariya said: “There may be protectionist measures… We are substantially open”.
Mounting a sharp attack on India, Trump had remarked that India is a “dead economy”.
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“I don’t care what India does with Russia. They can take their dead economies down together, for all I care,” Trump had said in a social media post on July 31. Trump later imposed 50 per cent tariff on Indian goods imported to the US with a brief exemption list. Commerce & Industry Minister Piyush Goyal had last week asserted in Parliament that India is the world’s fastest-growing major economy, contributing almost 16 per cent to the global growth and will soon become the third-largest economy in the world.
“In just over a decade, India has rapidly transformed from being one of the Fragile 5 to the fastest-growing major economy in the world. We have risen from the 11th largest economy to one of the top 5 economies, driven by our reforms, the hard work of our farmers, MSMEs and entrepreneurs,” Goyal had said in Parliament on July 31.