Everyone agrees that freedom is important, but that seemingly simple principle implicates a wide range of public policy choices and different forms of government. Most people have a sense of whether a nation is a free country, but articulating the standards that define one and undertaking a comprehensive analysis is a daunting task. Most who compile global rankings of various sorts restrict themselves to narrower and more easily definable categories, measuring factors such as the regulatory environment, civil liberties, democracy, press freedom, or other specific topics
The Human Freedom Index is unique because it takes in the whole scope of human freedom. To do that, it produces scores for 82 distinct indicators across 165 jurisdictions, encompassing 98.1 percent of the world’s population. Just released in its seventh annual edition for 2021, the Human Freedom Index is authored by Ian Vásquez, Fred McMahon, Ryan Murphy, and Guillermina Sutter Schneider and is copublished by the Cato Institute and the Fraser Institute, based in Canada.
As the authors explain, “The contest between liberty and power has been ongoing for millennia. For just as long, it has inspired competing conceptions of freedom.” Part of the report’s intent is to produce a comprehensive data set allowing for research about correlations between different kinds of freedoms, but it also aims to flesh out a fuller definition of freedom in the process.
“Freedom in our usage is a social concept that recognizes the dignity of individuals and is defined by the absence of coercive constraint.… Freedom thus implies that individuals have the right to lead their lives as they wish as long as they respect the equal rights of others.” Each country’s 82 indicators are grouped into categories covering the rule of law; security and safety; movement; religion; association, assembly, and civil society; expression and information; relationships; size of government; legal system and property rights; sound money; freedom to trade internationally; and regulation.
The trends are not comforting. Only 17 percent of the global population lives in jurisdictions that gained freedom from 2008 to 2019, while 83 percent lost ground. During that time, the most-improved nations included Myanmar (Burma), Sri Lanka, Tunisia, Ethiopia, and Armenia, though they still have much room for further improvement. The greatest declines were seen in Venezuela, Turkey, Nicaragua, Syria, and Bahrain, as authoritarian leaders have sought to crack down on dissent.
The countries at the top of the list demonstrate the strong correlation between freedom and prosperity, with a mix of high and rapidly growing income levels. Switzerland takes the top spot, followed by New Zealand, Denmark, Estonia, and Ireland. The United States has seen its scores decline, having ranked 7th in 2008 but falling to 15th place in this year’s report, tied with Germany and Japan.
The correlation between personal freedom and economic freedom is strong, but sometimes there is a gap where a country does notably better on one than the other. Singapore, for example, has long been noted for its robustly free-market economic policies, ranking 2nd in economic freedom, but an authoritarian political structure with little respect for civil liberties places the island city-state much further down, in 88th place, for personal freedom. On the other hand, Sweden was ranked 1st in the personal freedom category but 37th for economic freedom.
The data behind the scores in the Human Freedom Index are potentially useful for a wide range of research. They can be used to study the correlation between different kinds of freedom, as a way to track the increase or decrease of freedoms over time, to study the correlation between freedom and well-being metrics (such as income or reported happiness), and to tease out hidden trends that indicate whether certain kinds of freedom are more conducive to the spread of other freedoms.
The Human Freedom Index, including the full report and downloadable data sets, can be found at cato.org/human-freedom-index/2021.
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