Starting in the 1980s, Nobel economist Milton Friedman played an important role, along with many other economists and public pol- icy experts, in the development of an index of economic freedom that would allow researchers to be able to measure the degree to which a country had a free market economy. Those efforts culminated in the Fraser Institute’s publication in 1996 of the first edition of Economic Freedom of the World. There have been 14 more editions published since then in what is now an annual series. Large volumes of research have illustrated a positive relationship between economic freedom at the national level and economic growth. One of the.
