Context: The annual report named "World Economic league table " of the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) said that India will race by the UK by 2025, and Germany by 2027. 

• In its World Economic League Table, the consultancy also calculated that China could become a high-income economy as soon as 2023. 
• Further cementing Asia’s growing might, India is set to move up the rankings to become the No. 3 economy at the end of the decade.

Key highlights

• China set to take over the US economy ahead of time, by 2027 
• By 2030, India to unseat Japan as 3rd largest economy
• Japan would remain the world's third-biggest economy, in dollar terms, until the early 2030s when it would be overtaken by India, pushing Germany down from fourth to fifth.
• The weakness in Rupee has led to UK over-taking India this year. It estimates that by 2030, India would knock off Japan to become the third-largest economy in the world.
• The United Kingdom, currently the fifth-biggest economy by the CEBR's measure, would slip to sixth place from 2024.
• It also said the pandemic's impact on the global economy was likely to show up in higher inflation, not slower growth.

Indian scenario

• India, which appears to have been pushed back to being the world's sixth biggest economy in 2020, will again overtake the UK to become the fifth largest in 2025 and race to the third spot by 2030.
• India had overtaken the UK in 2019 to become the fifth largest economy in the world but has been relegated to 6th spot in 2020.
• The CEBR says India lost momentum even before the pandemic wrecked its economic growth. Stress on banking and an adverse hit on world trade only made the distress even worse. 
• It cites, "Slowing growth has been a consequence of a confluence of factors including fragility in the banking system, adjustment to reforms and a deceleration of global trade." 
• But it notes green shoots in India's economic recovery, helped by a resurgent agricultural sector. 

Conclusion

• "The infrastructure bottlenecks that exist in India mean that investment in this area has the potential to unlock significant productivity gains. Therefore, the outlook for the economy going forwards will be closely related to the government's approach to infrastructure spending."