The index published in Economic Freedom of the World measures the degree to which countries' policies and institutions support economic freedom. The cornerstones of economic freedom are personal choice, voluntary exchange, freedom to enter markets and compete, and security of the person and privately owned property. The EFW index now ranks 165 countries and territories. Data are available for more than 100 nations and territories back to 1950. This dataset makes it possible for scholars to analyze the impact of both cross-country differences in economic freedom and changes in that freedom across a time frame of three and a half decades.
For a consistent time series for a particular country and/or longitudinal data for a panel of countries, the Fraser Institute previously developed and reported a chain-linked version of the index. The EFW Panel Dataset is now entirely based on the chain-linking method, having the base year as 2020, and they will make the most recent year’s data the base year in the future.
Changes in a country’s scores backward
in time are based only on changes in components that were present in adjoining
years. It should be noted that the EFW Panel Dataset contains area and summary
ratings only for those years in which the country received a regular EFW index
rating.