New Rankings for Economic Liberty: Good News and Bad News for the United States

The folks at the Fraser Institute in Canada have just released a new version of Economic Freedom of the World.

As has been the case for many years, Hong Kong is #1 and Singapore is #2, followed by New Zealand (#3) and Switzerland (#4).

Interestingly, the United States improved one spot, climbing to #5.

Here’s the data for the top two quartiles.

The new version includes 2017, so fans of Trump will be able to claim vindication.

But not much.

As you can see, the EFW data shows that America’s score rose only slightly, from 8.17 to 8.19.

My view, for what it’s worth, is that Trump’s economic policy is somewhat incoherent.

He’s been good on taxes and red tape, but bad on spending and trade. So I’m not surprised we’re mostly treading water.

Now let’s look at the bottom half of the ranking.

In last place, unsurprisingly, we find Venezuela.

Let’s close with two final visuals.

Here’s a chart showing that poor people in the nations with the most economic liberty have much higher incomes that poor people in countries with less economic liberty.

The moral of the story, needless to say, is that people who genuinely want to help the poor should support free markets and limited government.

Last but not least, here are two tables I prepared.

The one on the left shows the nations with the biggest positive and negative changes since 2010, while the one on the right shows the biggest changes since 2000.

In some cases, such as Zimbabwe, a nation improved because it was in such terrible shape that it would have been difficult to do worse.

Though Venezuela seems determined to show that a terrible score can drop even farther.

For what it’s worth, Egypt’s slide toward statism is being subsidized by massive amounts of aid from American taxpayers.

And speaking of America, I’m embarrassed to acknowledge that the United States has suffered the 10-largest drop when looking at changes since 2000. That’s a legacy of the bad policies we got from George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Thanks for nothing, guys!