India Moves Up to 2nd Position in Mastercard Index™ of Consumer Confidence for H1, 2016

Mastercard Index™ of Consumer Confidence for H1, 2016 released recently,places India in extremely optimistic territory. India also further solidified its position with a score of 97.6, moved up to second spot in APAC.

India’s emergence as an economy with an extremely optimistic outllook is attributed to a rise in scores across the major five components that serve as parameters for evaluating an economy’s success.  Regular income and Employment are 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 by 6.1 to 97.8 points. The other key parameters include Quality of Life (97.5 points), followed by Economy (97.4 points) and Stock Market (96.8 points).

Speaking on India’s strong optimism in economic outlook, Porush Singh, Country Corporate Officer, India and Division President, South Asia for Mastercard said, “The findings are very 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.”

The Mastercard Index™ of Consumer Confidence (H1 2016) findings further reveal that the overall consumer confidence in Asia Pacific remains steady, showing stability in nine of the 17 markets. With a negligible increase of 0.05 points in the overall score, Asia Pacific continues to sit just below the 60 point optimistic mark at neutral. The Index and its accompanying reports should not be interpreted as indicators of Mastercard’s financial performance.

The emerging economies in APAC 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. Taiwan’s increase in score was backed by an improvement in all components, the largest coming from heightened expectations in stock market movements. After its recent elections in May, Philippines also saw a large improvement of 12.9 points to put it in extremely optimistic territory at 95.2 points which its highest level since the survey series on the Philippines began in 1995. On the other hand, seven of the 17 markets saw a deterioration in confidence levels compared to H2 2015. The biggest decline in optimism levels was observed in Indonesia, followed by Hong Kong, and Singapore. According to the survey, prospects for employment was the key driver for decline in these markets.

Methodology 

Respondents were asked five questions pertaining to their six-month outlook on the economy, their employment prospects, the local stock market, their regular income prospects, and their quality of life. The results of their responses were converted in five component indexes which were subsequently averaged to form the Mastercard Index of Consumer Confidence (MICC) score. The MICC Index score and the 5 component index scores range from 0 – 100 where 0 represents maximum pessimism, 100 represents maximum optimism and 50 represents neutrality.