The Economic Freedom of the World Index (EFI) is presently available for the years 1970-2002 for Sweden. In this paper I present Swedish Economic Freedom Index (SEFI), an attempt to create a corresponding index for the period 1950-70. By combining EFI and SEFI, it is possible to see the changes...

This paper provides new evidence on the determinants of entrepreneurship across countries. The paper investigates the relationship between the institutional setting, in terms of economic freedom, and entrepreneurship, as measured by self-employment in a panel data setting covering 23 OECD...

A new empirical field of research in economics shows that policies characterized by economic freedom produce economic growth. “Economic freedom” means such things as a small government, protection of private property, a well-functioning legal system, free competition and few regulations. The...

Using the economic freedom index and the newly developed KOF-index of globalization, it is shown that the Scandinavian welfare states have experienced faster, bigger and more consistent increases in these areas, compared to the smaller European and the so called liberal welfare states. The...

We present new evidence on how generalized trust is formed. Unlike previous studies, we look at the explanatory power of economic institutions, we use newer data, we incorporate more countries, and we use instrumental variables to handle the causality problem. A central result is that legal...

A teacher’s words reflect the theory and methods he uses. Words reveal theoretical structures, the problems identified as relevant, and how those problems should be analyzed. I investigate whether entrepreneurship-rich and institutions-rich theories are represented in Ph.D. programs in...

Several recent studies have found a negative relation between government size and economic growth in rich countries. Since countries with big government have experienced above average improvements in both the Economic freedom index and the KOF globalization index, we argue that existing studies...

While studies of the relationship between economic freedom and economic growth have shown it to be positive, significant and robust, it has rightly been argued that different areas of economic freedom may have quite different effects on growth. Along that line, Carlsson and Lundström (2002)...

This paper investigates whether social cohesion makes economic reforms more likely. First, we investigate whether social cohesion is a coherent concept by using a principal-component factor (PCF) analysis covering 16 indicators used to measure social cohesion in the previous literature for 40...

Francis Fukuyama argues that liberal democracy is the final form of human government and will become more and more prevalent in the long term. If this prediction is true, countries should converge in their political and economic systems toward liberal democracy, a form of institutional...