But what if you want to know the countries with the best and worst consequences? In that case, the best option might be Professor Steve Hanke’s annual Misery Index.
On that basis, the worst-governed country in 2022 was Zimbabwe, followed by Venezuela and Syria.
What’s the methodology for Professor Hanke’s Index?
In the economic sphere, misery tends to flow from high inflation, steep borrowing costs, and unemployment. …Comparing countries’ metrics can tell us a lot about where in the world people are sad or happy. Hanke’s Annual Misery Index (HAMI) gives us the answers. My version of the misery index is the sum of the year-end unemployment (multiplied by two), inflation, and bank-lending rates, minus the annual percentage change in real GDP per capita. Higher readings on the first three elements are “bad” and make people more miserable. These “bads” are offset by a “good” (real GDP per capita growth).
What are the countries with the best outcomes?
The nation with the least misery is Switzerland, which also happens to be the world’s most libertarian nation (needless to say, I don’t think that’s a coincidence).
I’ll share one final excerpt from Hanke’s article. He points out that Switzerland’s spending cap is a big reason for the nation’s success.
Switzerland has the lowest HAMI score in the world. One reason for that is the Swiss debt brake. The debt brake has worked like a charm. Unlike most countries, Switzerland’s debt-to-GDP ratio has been on a downward trend in the last two decades, since it enshrined its debt brake into its constitution in a 2002 national referendum. In 2002, central-government debt stood at 29.7 percent of GDP, and by 2018 had been reduced to 18.7 percent.
As a libertarian, my answer is that freedom is preferable to coercion. Freedom also ranks higher than prosperity. For instance, the government might be able to boost economic output by requiring people to work seven days a week, but such a policy would be odious and indefensible.
As an economist, I have a more utilitarian perspective. The best argument against statism is that it simply doesn’t work. Nations with bigger government and more intervention routinely under-perform compared to otherwise-similar countries with small government and free markets.
That’s why I often present my leftist friends with my two-question challenge. I ask them to name a country, anywhere on the planet and at any point in history, that either become rich with statist policies or has experienced superior levels of growth with statist policies.
And if they are willing to have an extended discussion, my next step is to compare the long-run performance of market-friendly jurisdictions with statist jurisdictions. Whether we’re looking at Chile vs. Venezuela, North Korea vs. South Korea, or Hong Kong vs. Argentina, the results always show that economic liberty is the recipe for growth and prosperity.
When I ask them to show a statist nation with decades of good results, they don’t have an answer. Or, to be more specific, they never have an accurate answer since China (their reflex response) only started to grow once the economy was partially liberalized.
I’m pontificating on this topic because a reader sent me this very stark contrast between market-friendly Botswana and the statist hellhole of Zimbabwe. I can’t vouch for the specific numbers, though it appears some of them are from the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom.
The obvious lesson is that good policy is producing vastly superior results in Botswana.
But I wanted independent confirmation since not everything one sees on the Internet is true (shocking!).
So I checked Human Progress, the invaluable data portal created by Marian Tupy, and downloaded more than 50 years of data for inflation-adjusted ($2010) per-capita GDP in Botswana, Zimbabwe, and South Africa.
The results, to put it mildly, are stunning. Botswana has enjoyed much faster growth than South Africa and Zimbabwe has suffered horrible stagnation.
And I guess the gap between Botswana and Zimbabwe shouldn’t surprise me, either. After all, Marian wrote about the difference between Botswana and Zimbabwe back in 2008.
How different, I thought, was Zimbabwe from Botswana, the latter of which is safe and increasingly prosperous. But what accounts for such striking differences between the two neighbors? It turns out that much of the difference stems from the degree of freedom that each populace enjoys.
Here’s some of what he wrote about Botswana.
As Robert Guest of The Economist noted in his 2004 book, The Shackled Continent, “In the last 35 years, Botswana’s economy has grown faster than any other in the world…” According to Scott Beaulier, an economist at Beloit College, “Khama adopted pro-market policies on a wide front. His new government promised low and stable taxes to mining companies, liberalized trade, increased personal freedoms, and kept marginal income tax rates low to deter tax evasion and corruption.” …Economic openness served Botswana well. Between 1966 and 2006, its average annual compound growth rate of GDP per capita was 7.22 percent — higher than China’s 6.99 percent. Its GDP per capita (adjusted for inflation and purchasing power parity) rose from $671 in 1966 to $10,813 in 2005.
And here are some of his observations about Zimbabwe.
…almost all of the country’s 4,000 white-owned farms were invaded by state-organized gangs. Some of the farmers who resisted the land seizures were murdered, while others fled abroad. …The agricultural sector soon collapsed, and with it most of Zimbabwe’s tax revenue and foreign currency reserves. …the government ordered the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ) to print more money, sparking the first hyperinflation of the 21st century. …Mugabe’s answer to the falling economy was to increase state patronage and the intensity of the looting.
Needless to say, nothing has changed in the decade since that article was published. Though hopefully Mugabe’s recent ouster may lead to better policy in Zimbabwe (it would be difficult to move in the wrong direction, though Venezuela is evidence that further deterioration is possible).
Let’s conclude with a video I shared three years ago, but it’s worth a second look since we’re considering Botswana’s comparative success.
By the way, none of this suggests Botswana is perfect. Indeed, it’s not even close.
According to the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World, it is ranked #50, which means it isn’t even in the top quartile. And its latest score of 7.37 (out of 10) is well below top-ranked Hong Kong’s score of 8.97.
But you don’t have to be fast to win a race. You simply need to be quicker than your competitors. And, on the continent of Africa, Botswana has the most economic freedom.
When I write about the negative impact of statist policy, I focus on two types of nations.
From the developed world, I highlight countries such as France, Greece, and Italy.
And from the developing world, my favorite examples are places like Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea.
Given that Zimbabwe is in the news because the nation’s long time dictator may be on the way out, it’s time to add that country to that latter list. James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute writes about “Mugabenomics.”
It’s especially compelling when reality makes your economic and and political points vividly clear and intellectually inescapable. Nothing like a natural experiment to drive a message home. …At unification, West German living standards were more than twice those in the communist East… Venezuela shows what happens when full authoritarian populism gets put into action. And who hasn’t seen the stark image of the two Koreas at night, the prosperity of the South glowing brightly. Then there’s the case of Zimbabwe, which just saw a coup removing dictator Robert Mugabe after nearly four decades in power.
Here’s the chart showing how Zimbabwe has fallen behind some peer nations.
Why has Zimbabwe gone downhill?
The answer, you won’t be surprised to learn, is bad policy. They’ve taken the recipe for good policy and done the opposite.
In 1995, Zimbabwe was ranked #70 by Economic Freedom of the World. Not great, but not awful. Now. as you can see from the chart, it’s down to #144. Some of that is due to more nations being added to the rankings and many nations improving their scores, but Mugabe’s statism deserves much of the blame.
Assuming Mugabe is deposed, that’s Step 1.
If the goal is prosperity and opportunity for the people of Zimbabwe, Step 2 is needed. And that’s an agenda of liberalization.
At the very least, Zimbabwe should copy the neighboring nation of Botswana. Ideally, it could go farther and become the Chile or Estonia of Africa.
I hope the title to this blog post is completely wrong, but the news out of Europe is very grim. Politicians have been over-spending and going deeper and deeper into debt. This negatively affects the private sector in the usual ways (higher taxes, unproductive allocation of resources, etc), but also creates instability in the financial sector since many banks and other institutions have naively lent lots of money to corrupt and inefficient governments. And as this story from the Telegraph indicates, the European Central Bank has been forced to surrenders its independence and is now monetizing government debt. In theory, the ECB is taking other steps to compensate, but the problem is so large (and the political willingness to solve the problem by radically shrinking government is so small) that it is difficult to see a good ending to this saga.
Fitch Ratings has warned that it may take massive asset purchases by the European Central Bank to prevent Europe’s sovereign debt crisis escalating out of control. …The ECB agreed to start buying Greek, Portuguese, and Irish bonds in April to help buttress the EU’s `shock and awe’ package, known as the European Financial Stability Facility. Total purchases so far have been €47bn (£39bn). It has focused its firepower on Greece, mopping up some €25bn of government bonds. This has prevented a collapse of the Greek debt market but at the high political price of letting banks and funds dump their holdings onto the EU taxpayer. ECB council member Jose Manuel Gonzalez-Paramo said it was “not entirely correct” to assume that the ECB was the sole buyer of the debt. “We will continue buying bonds until the situation has stabilized,” he said. …Fitch said European banks must refinance nearly €2 trillion of long-term debt by the end of 2012 in an unfriendly market. “There’s an awful lot of debt coming due in 2011 and 2012, and that is becoming a concern,” said Bridget Gandy, the agency’s banking expert.
Hanke’s Annual Misery Index (HAMI) gives us the answers. My version of the misery index is the sum of the year-end unemployment (multiplied by two), inflation, and bank-lending rates, minus the annual percentage change in real GDP per capita. Higher readings on the first three elements are “bad” and make people more miserable. These “bads” are offset by a “good” (real GDP per capita growth).
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