The Economic Freedom Index of your Country

How much economic freedom exists in your country?

You can find it out at The Economic Freedom of the World Project which is devoted to "promoting economic freedom around the world". The network has member institutes in over 70 nations.

They define Economic Freedom as:

Individuals have economic freedom when property they acquire without the use of force, fraud, or theft is protected from physical invasions by others and they are free to use, exchange, or give their property as long as their actions do not violate the identical rights of others. An index of economic freedom should measure the extent to which rightly acquired property is protected and individuals are engaged in voluntary transactions.

James Gwartney and Robert Lawson et al.
Economic Freedom of the World: 1996 Annual Report

Their annual Economic Freedom of the World Report uses 42 distinct pieces of data to measure economic freedom in 141 nations. As per their latest report, the TOP rankings are:

1. Hong Kong (8.9/10)
2. Singapore (8.8)
3. New Zealand (8.5)
4. Switzerland (8.3)
5. United States, United Kingdom, Canada (8.1)

More at TOP: Estonia (8.0), Australia (7.9), and Ireland (7.9).

The rankings and scores of other large economies are:

• Germany, 18 (7.6)
• Japan, 22 (7.5)
• Mexico, 44 (7.1)
• France, 52 (7.0)
• Italy, 52 (7.0)
• India, 69 (6.6)
• China, 86 (6.3)
• Brazil, 101 (6.0)
• Russia, 112 (5.8)

At the bottom, we have Zimbabwe, Myanmar and the Democratic Republic of Congo with the lowest economic freedom ratings of the 141 countries measured.

Download the complete report with data tables here.