For the last two years we at The India Expert have been predicting that India’s growth rate will enable its economy to become larger than France and the United Kingdom very soon. Brexit has slowed the UK economy a bit already. India has slowed too with lower automobile sales and weak real estate sales. But other sectors in India have done well and the benefits of the harmonized goods and service tax are starting to trickle in. So one small organization based in Walnut, California, the World Population Review apparently published a report stating that India has already exceeded those two countries.
“India’s economy is the fifth largest in the world with a GDP of $2.94 trillion, overtaking the UK and France in 2019 to take the fifth spot,” it said. The size of the UK economy is $2.83 trillion and that of France is $2.71 trillion.
Overnight virtually every major Indian media has carried the story from India Today to the Financial Express to the Economic Times to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s own website .
Notably this has not yet been reported by western media: Wall Street Journal, Financial Times or global institutions such as the World Bank, the OECD or the International Monetary Fund. In fact even the World Population Review’s own website has mixed messages, showing India as seventh or fifth depending on what you wish to read.
But the more important message for everyone is that India’s growth, its young population and its entrepreneurial culture make it the most interesting country in the world today to expand your sales, lower your costs, increase your capacity, improve speed to market and more. The exact date on which the economies charts cross over France and the UK is actually far less important. If your company is not taking a close look at India, they are making a big mistake in 2020.
Last updated: December 26th, 2025
