Asheville – “The Human Freedom Index 2020: A Global Measure of Personal, Civil, and Economic Freedom,” is now available. Each year, the report ranks the nations of the world in terms of multiple measures of personal and economic freedom. These days, when the world is full of lists and surveys that lean more toward emotional responses to vague questions treated with no attempt at statistical analysis, this report, sponsored by the Cato and Fraser Institutes, continues to make an attempt at statistical rigor, going into considerable depth to explain its methods and assumptions.
This year, authors Ian Vásquez and Fred McMahon analyzed 162 countries in terms of 76 indices. As with World Health Organizations’ rankings that will give a country a higher score if it provides wider access to free abortion, this list’s authors may consider flagships of freedom things that may offend the reader. To be clear, the authors provide the questions they asked, why those questions were considered representative, how they arrived at the answers, and how they weighted them. It is important to note that the report used 2018 data, the two-year lag being necessary for nations to report their data and the authors to run their calculations.
How Countries Fared
The broad categories explored were: Rule of Law; Security and Safety; Movement; Religion; Association, Assembly, and Civil Society; Expression and Information; Identity and Relationships; Size and Government; Legal System and Property Rights; Access to Sound Money; Freedom to Trade Internationally; and Regulation of Credit, Labor, and Business. Each of these was broken down into three to eight subcategories, which were scored on a scale of zero to ten. These scores were then averaged according to specialized formulae to yield categorical and overall scores.
This year, New Zealand (8.87), Switzerland (8.82), and Hong Kong (8.74) topped the list as they did last year. The other top-10 countries were Denmark (8.73), Australia (8.68), Canada (8.64), Ireland (8.62), Estonia (8.54), Germany (8.52), and Sweden (8.52). The bottom three slots were taken by Venezuela (4.08), Sudan (4.01), and Syria (3.97). Other countries of interest include Israel (53rd, 7.44), Mexico (86th, 6.85), India (111th, 6.43), Russia (115th, 6.31), China (129th, 6.07), and Saudi Arabia (151st, 5.29).
The United States came in 17th, tied with the United Kingdom. This isn’t out of line with where the U.S. has been for the last decade, although before that it was long a fixture among the top three. The country’s absolute score was 8.44, but its year-over-year drop of 0.11 points makes it an extreme outlier among the top 50.
The U.S. earned its worst score, 4.5, for restrictions on foreign trade. The category with the lowest overall score, 6.7, was Rule of Law. On the bright side, this wasn’t so bad as the unthinkable conditions that registered on the scales of other nations, such as ongoing terrorist attacks and other forms of armed conflict. The U.S. also fared considerably better than those that still allow a variety of labor practices long banished in Western civilization, and it received high marks for its monetary policy. Scores for property rights and the size of government weren’t all that hot.
Freedoms
There also remains room for improvement in the Religious Freedom category. The U.S. actually scored in the sevens for both religious harassment and repression. Legal restrictions on religion as well as overall freedom to worship according to conscience were not that much better. The country scored higher for its liberal views on marriage and relationships, scoring perfect 10s except for the ease with which a person can receive legal recognition for a nonbiological gender. Other perfect 10s came in the area of women’s rights. For example, women in this country are free to move about without spousal consent, and this country does consider their abuse and mutilation a crime. Other nations still live by other codes.
The country does well in freedom of expression and access to information, scoring perfect 10s in all categories except for the number of members of the press killed. In 2018, it was still above the rest for keeping journalists out of jail and letting media outlets run independently of state messaging. The country also did well with freedom of movement and the right to assemble; one can only speculate how the COVID years will upend future reports.
The authors lament that, on the whole, according to their metrics, year-over-year global freedom only improved 0.01 points. Decade-over-decade freedom actually decreased by 0.04 points. Different ways of assessing the distribution of freedom indicate the gap is widening between the scores of more-free and less-free nations. Also, less-free nations tend to be more populous, the least-free quartile having double the population of the most-free.
Overall, the authors caution, global freedom is worse than the numbers suggest because six percent of the global population was not included in the analysis. As in past years, official government data from countries like North Korea and Cuba, where freedom indices would fall, conservatively, within the lowest quartile, was considered too unreliable for this exercise.
Now, there would be no point in analyzing global freedom in such detail if it didn’t correlate somehow with something non-economists can feel, like health and prosperity. So, as always, the authors established a pretty strong correlation between freedom, the presumptive cause, and income: average per capita earnings of the top quartile being $50,340; that of the bottom, $7,720. They also, as always, reported a “strong relationship between human freedom and democracy.”