Economic Freedom of the World: 2007 Annual Report
Source: Cato Institute
From press release:

The annual peer-reviewed report uses 42 different measures to create an index ranking countries around the world based on policies that encourage economic freedom. The cornerstones of economic freedom are personal choice, voluntary exchange of goods and services, freedom to compete and security of privately owned property. The lead authors of the overall report are James D. Gwartney, Professor of Economics at Florida State University, and Robert A. Lawson, Professor of Economics at Capital University in Columbus, Ohio.

Countries’ economic freedom scores are telling as the report has found that nations that are economically free out-perform non-free nations in indicators of well-being.
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Hong Kong maintains the first place in economic freedom with a score of 8.9 out of 10. The other top six scores are: Singapore (8.8), New Zealand (8.5), Switzerland (8.3), Canada (8.1), United Kingdom (8.1), United States (8.1), Estonia (8.0), Australia (7.9), and Ireland (7.9).

On the opposite end of the scale, the majority of nations ranked in the bottom ten are African with the exception of Venezuela and Myanmar. These are: Zimbabwe (2.9), Myanmar (3.8), the Democratic Republic of Congo (4.0), Angola (4.2), the Republic of Congo (4.3), Central Africa Republic (4.6), Venezuela (4.9), Burundi (5.0), Chad (5.1), and Niger (5.1).

In Latin America, the countries with the highest economic freedom rankings are Chile (11 out of 141) and El Salvador (18). In continental Africa, Botswana had the highest ranking (38).

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