Indian households outdo emerging market peers on cutting debt levels

Only one among BRIC countries to have cut leverage to levels to pre-pandemic levels

Indian households cut debt levels faster than major emerging market peers.

Household debt levels are now lower than they were before the Covid-19 pandemic. Peer economies like Brazil, Russia and China had higher household debt than they did in 2019; shows an analysis of updated Global Debt Database numbers from the Washington-based International Monetary Fund (IMF) released on December 12. India’s household debt was the equivalent of 34.6 per cent of its gross domestic product (GDP) in 2021 compared to 36.4 per cent in 2019.

The GDP is a measure of a country’s economic activity. Measuring debt as a percentage