HFI24: Switzerland Stays Number One

December 18, 2024 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty

The new Human Freedom Index has been released and – just like last year – the “sensible nation” of Switzerland wins the gold medal as the jurisdiction with the highest level of economic and personal freedom.

Here are the world’s 20-freest nations (out of a total of 165 jurisdictions), with New Zealand and Denmark winning the silver and bronze medals. The United States ranks #17, tied with the United Kingdom, which is decent but not great.

The three worst nations for human freedom are all in the Middle East. Syria is last, followed by Yemen and Iran. Though hellholes such as Cuba and North Korea almost surely are worse, but they are not in the rankings because of inadequate data.

Before offering my observations on some of the findings, here are some passages from the report’s executive summary.

Human freedom deteriorated severely in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. Most areas of freedom fell, including significant declines through 2022 in freedom of movement, expression, and association and assembly; and in sound money. After having fallen significantly in 2020 and further in 2021, human freedom increased in 2022 but remained well below its pre-pandemic level… On a scale of 0 to 10, where 10 represents more freedom, the average human freedom rating for 165 jurisdictions fell from 6.98 in 2019 to 6.76 in 2020 and to 6.73 in 2021, and then increased in 2022 to 6.82. On the basis of that coverage, 87.4 percent of the world’s population saw a fall in human freedom from 2019 to 2022, with many more jurisdictions decreasing (130) than increasing (28) their ratings and 7 remaining unchanged. …Jurisdictions in the top quartile of freedom enjoy a significantly higher average per capita income ($56,366) than those in other quartiles; the average per capita income in the least free quartile is $15,826. The HFI also finds a strong, positive relationship between human freedom and democracy, and between human freedom and a range of human well-being indicators including tolerance, charitable giving, life expectancy, and environmental health, among other measures.

I’ll now draw attention to three things from the report, two of them depressing.

The first depressing observation is that overall human freedom has declined in recent decades, as depicted by Figure 1 from the report.

For what it’s worth, the decline is due to an erosion in personal freedom. Average economic freedom scores have increased over time (to be more specific, declines in the western world have been more than offset by improvements in less-developed countries).

The second depressing observation is about Hong Kong.

As you can see from this next chart, that jurisdiction’s relative ranking has precipitously declined. It used to rank in the top 10 and now it has fallen to #50. Some of the decline is economic policy, but the big problem is a decline in personal liberty.

Now for an observation that is neither cheerful nor depressing. Here’s what the report said about how governments normally having a similar approach to both personal and economic liberty.

But normally is not always.

The correlation between the personal and economic freedom ratings is high (0.73). …Some countries ranked consistently high in both personal and economic freedom. …By contrast, some countries that ranked high on personal freedom ranked significantly lower in economic freedom. For example, Suriname ranked 41st in personal freedom but fell to 141st in economic freedom, and Argentina ranked 40th in personal freedom but 159th in economic freedom. Similarly, some countries that ranked high in economic freedom found themselves significantly lower in personal freedom. For example, Singapore ranked 2nd in economic freedom while ranking 79th in personal freedom; Bahrain ranked 34th in economic freedom but 156th in personal freedom.

Figure 3 shows the relationship between the two types of freedom.

P.S. I wrote last month that I’m looking forward to seeing Argentina enjoy a stunning increase in its future rankings for economic liberty. That will naturally boost its ranking for overall liberty as well.

P.P.S. I’m not expecting any meaningful changes in the score for the United States following Trump’s election. There may be positive changes in some areas, but those improvements will be offset by restrictions on freedom in other areas.