India moves up in MasterCard consumer confidence index

The MasterCard Index of Consumer Confidence for the first half of 2016 has placed India in “extremely optimistic” territory. The country also further solidified its position with a score of 97.6, moving up to the second spot in the Asia Pacific (APAC) region. The overall consumer confidence and the five-component index scores range from 0 to 100, where 0 represents maximum pessimism, 100 maximum optimism and 50

neutrality. The five components include regular income, employment, quality of life, economy and stock market. It said India's emergence as an economy with an extremely optimistic outlook was attributed to a rise in scores across the five major components that serve as parameters for evaluating an economy's success. Here, regular income and employment were the key factors leading to the extreme optimism in the economic outlook. While regular income took a leap of 7.9 points to reach 98.7 points, the outlook towards employment rose 6.1 to 97.8 points. The other key parameters included quality of life (97.5 points), followed by economy (97.4 points) and stock market (96.8 points).

Porush Singh, country corporate officer-India, and division president of South Asia for Mastercard, said: "The findings are encouraging for India, which is among the most optimistic markets in the Asia Pacific region. Growing consumer confidence and higher incomes are boosting consumer spending, signifying further impetus to overall economic growth and dynamism across sectors in India."

Overall, consumer confidence in the Asia Pacific markets remained stable, increasing by only 0.05 points to 59.72 in the first half of 2016, from 59.67 points in the second haft of 2015. The number of markets below the 50 neutral line remain the same (eight of the 17 markets) as the last survey. The emerging economies exhibited the highest gains, with Taiwan leading the pack, recording the largest gain of 16.3 points to 45.3 points — a leap from ranking the lowest amongst the 17 markets in the previous survey in H2 2015. Apart from India, the developing markets of Philippines (95.2), Vietnam (94.9) and Myanmar (99.8) remain extremely optimistic in their outlook. Declines were recorded in seven out of 17 Asia Pacific markets, with significant deterioration seen in Indonesia (-14.7), Hong Kong (-12.4) and Singapore (-10.7).

The decreases recorded in Hong Kong, Japan (-8.8) and Singapore moved these markets from neutral into pessimistic territory. China’s consumer confidence score improved by 1.4 points to 76.0.

This survey was conducted between June and July 2016 on 8,746 respondents aged 18-64 years in 17 Asia Pacific markets including India, China, Australia, Japan, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Indonesia among others. Respondents were asked five questions pertaining to their six-month outlook on the economy, employment prospects, the local stock market, their regular income prospects and their quality of life.

The results of their responses were converted into five component index scores, which were subsequently averaged to form the MICC score.

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