The following is an interview conducted by Archbridge chief economist and Profectus co-editor Justin Callais with the lead authors of the Human Freedom Index, co-published by the Cato Institute and the Fraser Institute.
The Human Freedom Index is the most comprehensive measure of global freedom, covering 165 jurisdictions and representing 98% of the world’s population. The 10th annual edition (released in 2024) uses 86 distinct indicators encompassing personal, civil, and economic freedom. We discuss the results of this latest edition and key findings from the project.
Justin Callais: Can you briefly explain the two major components of the Human Freedom Index (HFI): personal freedom and economic freedom?
Matthew D. Mitchell: Conceptually speaking, we can think of human freedom as being made up of personal freedom and economic freedom. Personal freedoms refer to non-economic activity, like the freedom to associate, to assemble, or to express oneself; economic freedoms include the freedom to exchange, to produce, or to contract.
As a practical matter, the HFI measures these freedoms using 12 broad areas. Five of these are taken directly from the Economic Freedom of the World report, and then we add an additional seven measures of personal freedom.
Ian Vasquez: Our personal freedom sub-index also includes rule of law and safety and security measures. We consider freedom from arbitrary rule as an essential condition of liberty, and so we take into account such things as due process and improper government influence in the carrying out of justice. Likewise, personal security is both an indicator of freedom and necessary for other liberties to flourish. Thus, we measure the degree of violence, including homicides, disappearances, internal conflicts, and wars.
Justin: There seems to be a general decline in human freedom over the last few years. Are any of these trends surprising, and what are the driving forces behind those movements?
Ian: If you look at a graph of human freedom from the year 2000 to the most recent year we measure, you see that it was rising until its high point in the years 2005-07. There followed a slow decline in the aftermath of the global financial crisis that coincided with the rise of illiberalism around the world in its various forms—authoritarian populism, nationalism, fascism, socialism, etc. With the outbreak of the pandemic in 2020, global human freedom falls off a cliff, affecting more than 90% of the world’s population and setting the world back more than two decades in terms of overall freedom.
Matthew: COVID clearly looms large here. Not only did governments act quickly and aggressively to restrain personal freedoms, such as freedom of movement and freedom of assembly, but they also restricted economic freedoms, limiting when, where, and how people could exchange. At the same time, governments also introduced various new spending programs to address the economic disruption associated with COVID and government restrictions. Many of these new programs were financed by printing money, leading to an outbreak of inflation.
Justin: Do you expect this trend to continue, or will we see more positive movements in the future?
Matthew: The good news is that in most places the COVID restrictions are gone. However, we are still dealing with the fallout from all that new government spending and monetary accommodation. The general pattern in these sorts of things is that government growth tends to ratchet up during a crisis. It then ratchets back down but rarely returns to its previous, pre-crisis level. That is what I expect to happen here. Over the next few years, measured human freedom is likely to increase as government restrictions go away. But I’d guess that, in many places, it isn’t likely to return to pre-crisis levels, especially when it comes to government spending.
Ian: I think it’s safe to say that, while the world has recovered freedom compared to its most repressed moments during COVID, we are still not as free as we were in January 2020. The pandemic accelerated illiberal trends that had already been going on, such as a global deterioration in freedom of speech, and it strengthened authoritarian regimes that used the disease as a pretext to crack down on dissent. Overall, I think we are beginning to see a greater gap between the freest countries (that are not yet at their pre-pandemic levels) and the least free countries (that have not recovered as much freedom in the aftermath of COVID).
Justin: Are there any findings that stand out in this year’s report?
Ian: One thing that stands out is the clear, and often sharp, deterioration of overall freedom in the countries ruled by populist regimes of the left or the right. Hungary’s ranking under Viktor Orban, for example, fell from 32 to 63, while Turkey’s ranking under Recep Erdogan has fallen from 89 to 142. Likewise, since 2000, Argentina has fallen from 53rd to 80th place under mostly Peronist rule, while Venezuela’s ranking under Chavista rule has fallen from 104 to 159. The loss of both economic and personal liberties is the rule.
Hong Kong, once one of the freest places on Earth, has also seen a significant fall in the index since Beijing began intruding on its autonomy and finally violated it completely with its draconian security law in 2020. Thus, the territory’s ranking fell from 3 in 2010 to 50 in 2022. The most significant declines occurred in personal freedom. Its ranking in terms of freedom of assembly and association, for example, fell from 77 in 2000 to 141 in 2022.
Justin: Your project also looks at how human freedom relates to various outcomes of human flourishing. Are there any relationships that surprised you, and what areas do you think deserve more attention from researchers?
Matthew: I’m not surprised to see that human freedom positively correlates with plenty of outcomes that people care about. And it appears that much of this is driven by economic freedom. In a few instances, however, preliminary analysis suggests that personal freedoms are driving some of the relationships that we see. For example, the overall positive association between human freedom and tolerance may be largely driven by the personal freedoms that are included in the index. When it comes to corruption, life satisfaction, and scientific publication, both personal and economic freedom seem to be important. These are pretty simple correlations and so the relationships might not stand up to deeper scrutiny, but I think these are relationships that we ought to better understand.
Ian: Freedom plays a central role in human progress, and the evidence the index presents is consistent with that insight. But as we say in the report, the HFI is a treasure trove of data that offers ample opportunity to more rigorously research the complex ways in which freedom influences, and can be influenced by, political regimes, economic development, and the whole range of indicators of human well-being. There is still a lot we don’t know about liberty.
Justin: Can you expand on that?
Matthew: Causal connections are always hard to pin down in social science, so I think there is more room to nail those down. We also don’t have the best understanding of when and why certain places permit their citizens more or less human freedom. In other words, it’d be good to have a better understanding of what causes human freedom.
Justin: What policy recommendations would you offer to areas looking to improve human freedom? Are there any components that tend to be “first movers”?
Matthew: Great question. I’m not sure we know enough to answer it yet, but we can start to formulate some hypotheses. In the 1990s, economists Andrew Warner and Jeffrey Sachs argued that trade liberalization was important for transition economies. Open trade not only established “powerful direct linkages between the economy and the world system,” they argued, “but [it] also effectively forces the government to take actions on the other parts of the reform program and the pressures of international competition.” Thanks to the work of Russ Sobel and others, using the EFW index, we now know that Warner and Sachs were right.
We can imagine similar patterns with human freedom more broadly. Maybe religious freedoms pave the way for freedom of expression more generally? Perhaps freedom of movement is necessary to secure other freedoms since it permits people to vote with their feet? And maybe certain economic freedoms help support personal freedoms. I’d love to see people use the HFI to tackle these questions.
Ian: One strong empirical finding from the HFI is that economic and personal freedoms tend to go hand-in-hand. I often say to people who cherish personal freedom but are critical of, or even hostile to, economic freedoms: If you want to live in a country with high levels of personal freedom, you better pick a country that has relatively high levels of economic freedom. So, one piece of advice is to embrace freedom in all its dimensions. Encouraging the widespread appreciation of overall freedom is important because, at the end of the day, the predominant values in society, or at least among the elite, play a large and often determinant role in the setting of policies.
