Overall country ratings on economic freedom by Fraser Institute and Heritage Foundation, which are probably the two most widely-used sources, are compared. Numerous cases of huge differences between country ranks for the two sets of ratings are noted. A simple illustration shows that inferences...

New data on poverty released by World Bank in March 2012 are used to provide estimates of income (growth) elasticity of poverty for 2005--2008 and to compare these with two earlier periods. Five points are noted. First, there is a big drop in the overall elasticity for developing countries for...