The Economic Freedom of the World (EFW) annual reports have presented an economic freedom index for a large set of nations around the world. This index is designed to measure the degree to which a nation’s policies and institutions protect its citizens’ economic freedom. In this article, we...

Development is a process and there are at least four phases of the process: (1) pre-development, (2) initial growth, (3) improved productivity, and (4) receding growth. Other things constant, the growth of per capita GDP will be higher in phases 2 and 3 than phases 1 and 4. The development...