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...

There is enormous literature on the determinants of consumption of cigarettes and other tobacco products, and on the magnitude of the impact of a wide variety of economic and noneconomic factors. Also, a huge amount of research has been done on the association between income inequality and...

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...