Has India's Growth Cycle Joined the World's? Correlations, a Stationary-Bootstrap Test and the Concordance Identity for Annual GDP Growth, 1961–2025

I measure how closely India's annual real GDP growth has moved with growth in the rest of the world, using World Bank data for 1961 to 2025 and a GDP-weighted aggregate of all other economies. The correlation was negative in 1961 to 1990 (minus 0.295), positive in 1991 to 2007 (0.568) and higher still in 2008 to 2025 (0.699). The last figure rests almost entirely on two years: 2020 and 2021 supply 98.0% of the sum of cross-products, and without them the correlation is 0.027. I prove an exact identity linking the Harding–Pagan concordance index to the correlation of the above-average-growth indicators, and use it to show that India and the rest of the world agreed in 30% of years before 1991, against about 50% expected under independence. A stationary bootstrap gives a 95% interval of minus 0.014 to 0.985 for the change in correlation between 1961 to 1990 and 2008 to 2025 without the pandemic years. The evidence supports a move from a negative to a roughly zero comovement in normal years, consistent with the fading of Indian contractions that occurred in strong world years, and not a lasting coupling with the world cycle.