In the year 2020, 94 percent of the world’s population saw a fall in its freedom compared to the year before. The annual Human Freedom Index, released today by the Cato Institute and the Fraser Institute, documents how the Covid-19 pandemic was a catastrophe for human freedom.

The report uses 83 indicators of personal, civil, and economic freedom for 165 jurisdictions for 2020, the most recent year for which sufficient internationally comparable data is available. Most jurisdictions (148) saw a decline in freedom. This year’s index presents data beginning in 2000. It shows that after a high point in 2007, global freedom experienced a slow descent through 2019, after which it deteriorated sharply. The decline set global freedom back more than two decades, erasing any gains during that period.

The pandemic accelerated worrisome long-term trends—some 79 percent of the world’s population had already experienced decreases in its freedom from 2007 through 2019. Freedom of expression, the rule of law, and freedom of association and assembly were among the categories that most saw deterioration in the past two decades.

The United States has also seen a steady decline. It now ranks 23rd in the index, having fallen 7 places since 2019. In the year 2000, it ranked 6^th. The top ten freest countries in order are Switzerland, New Zealand, Estonia, Denmark, Ireland, Sweden, Iceland, Finland, Netherlands, and Luxembourg.

My co-authors—Fred McMahon, Ryan Murphy, and Guillermina Sutter Schneider—and I find that there is an unequal distribution of freedom in the world. Only 13 percent of the global population lives in the top quartile of countries in the index, while 40 percent live in the least free quartile. More than 75 percent lives in countries that are in the bottom half of the index.

We are almost certainly less free today than we were in January 2020, but only time will tell to what extent the world will regain its lost freedoms as the pandemic moderates, and our annual index will continue to monitor trends in the following years. As the world’s liberal democracies regain some of their lost freedoms, countries run by authoritarian regimes may lag further behind, thus increasing the global inequality of freedom. It is telling that the ten jurisdiction that saw the largest declines in freedom since the global high point in 2007 are all led by authoritarian regimes. In order of largest declines, those are: Syria, Nicaragua, Hungary, Egypt, Venezuela, Turkey, El Salvador, Burundi, Bahrain, and Hong Kong.

To see those and other findings, see the report here.