Moody’s Slashes India’s GDP Growth Forecast For FY20 From 6.6% To 5.4%

On Monday, Moody's Investors Service slashed its FY 2019-20 GDP (gross domestic product) growth projection for India to 5.4 percent from 6.6 percent earlier. The forecast for FY 2020-21 was lowered to 5.8 percent to 6.7 percent.

The financial services company said that the lower projections were on account of the weakness in the global economy due to the impact of the coronavirus outbreak that could also hurt India's recovery.

"Improvements in the latest high frequency indicators such as PMI data suggest that the economy may have stabilized. While the economy may well begin to recover in the current quarter, we expect any recovery to be slower than we had previously expected." it said.

Moody's also reduced global growth projections, saying that the coronavirus outbreak across the world has diminished optimism about prospects of an incipient stabilization of growth this year.

At the end of Sunday, official data showed that death toll from the virus in mainland China touched 1,770, with total confirmed cases at 70,548.