Ian Vásquez
Ian Vásquez
Today, December 17, we’re releasing the tenth edition of the annual Human Freedom Index, which we co-publish with the Fraser Institute. The report paints a picture of the state of global freedom and freedom within 165 countries, drawing on 86 indicators of personal, economic, and civil liberties dating back to the year 2000.
The index reflects our belief that freedom should be measured carefully because it has inherent value and because it plays a central role in human progress. We define freedom as the absence of coercive constraint and think of it as a social concept that recognizes the dignity of the individual.
The following findings come from this year’s report—coauthored by Matthew Mitchell, Ryan Murphy, Guillermina Sutter Schneider, and me—and from a decade of publishing the index.
The top three countries in this year’s report are Switzerland, New Zealand, and Denmark; the bottom three are Iran, Yemen, and Syria, in descending order. The United States ranks 17th; it was 7th in the year 2000.
The high point in global human freedom since 2000, measured on a population-weighted basis, occurred in 2005–2007. It was followed by a slow decline in the aftermath of the global financial crisis and then a precipitous decline in 2020 with the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, setting any gains to global freedom back more than two decades. Global freedom saw a small improvement in the third year of the pandemic, 2022, the last year for which we have internationally comparable data.
Compared to 2007, most countries are less free, having lost a significant amount of economic or personal freedom or both.
Human freedom is strongly and positively related to well-being, including income, innovation, social tolerance, environmental performance, levels of charity, life expectancy, lower child mortality, etc.
Economic and personal freedom are strongly related. If you value high levels of personal liberty (such as freedom of expression, » Read More
https://www.cato.org/blog/ten-years-human-freedom-index