Index of Economic Freedom 2006

I stumbled across this index at the Heritage Foundation's site. The introductory article is a good read also.

The Index is really about people and their struggle to overcome barriers. And not just any barriers, but the ones their own governments erect to limit how much money they can make and how much they can keep – barriers that limit what they can do with their money and how far it can go.

To see how people are affected by such barriers (or the lack thereof), consider the relationship between economic freedom and per capita income.

The Index editors grade each country on a numeric scale that places it in one of four categories: free, mostly free, mostly unfree or repressed. Not surprisingly, the freer a country is economically, the higher the per capita income its citizens enjoy. People in “repressed” and “mostly unfree” economies have a per capita income that averages about $4,000. But those in “mostly free” countries have a per capita income of about $13,000. And those in “free” countries? More than $30,000.