Welcome to America, Land of the Less Free?

Kim Holmes / January 21, 2010

Just one year after President Barack Obama took office, we released the 16th edition of the Index of Economic Freedom in both Hong Kong and Washington. Once again, it provides empirical evidence that economic freedom is the pathway to prosperity.

The good news is that despite the global economic crisis, the overall level of global economic freedom remained about the same. Some countries improved while others declined.

The bad news is that the United States is one of the economies that declined. For the first time since we began measuring economic freedom, the United States fell out of the top tier of free economies into a lower “mostly free” tier, now ranked with countries like Belgium, Botswana and Sweden. The United States’ loss of economic freedom was worst among among the 20 major economies of the world.
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