India now a 'lower-middle-income' economy for World Bank

New Delhi, June 3: The World Bank has dropped the use of developing tion tag for India in its specialised reports and instead classifies it as a “lower-middle-income” economy in South Asia, a top official has said. “In our World Development Indicators publication, we’ve stopped grouping low- and middle-income countries together as ‘developing countries’. For alytical purposes, India continues to be classified as lower-middle-income economy,” World Bank Data Scientist Tariq Khokhar told IANS. “We are not changing term ‘developing countries’ or ‘developing world’ in our general work but when it comes to presenting specialized data, we will use more precise groupings of countries,” Khokhar said in an e-mail interview, adding, the term developing country was no more useful for alytical purposes. Accordingly, while India will be referred to as a lower-middle-income economy in all of World Bank’s alytical reports, it may be referred to as a developing country only in some of the generic communications. (ians)