It is worth pointing out what exactly the "Index of Economic Freedom" is measuring, however. If you take a look at the methodology you will notice many curious things about it - the index includes many measurements of effective governance that are not directly related to what laws or policies are on the books or what people talk about when they typically talk about "economic freedom" (as in to what degree is the government corrupt and to what degree is the government capable of enforcing the laws and policies it has on the books, or to what degree are economic transactions inhibited not necessarily by any formal restriction on it but by the government's inability to secure said transactions). Furthermore, the methodology even goes so far as to simply take economic outcomes that are more or less universally viewed as good and treat their presence as constituting economic freedom - a very specific example would be inflation, where a weighted average rate of inflation over the past three years is factored in to their measurement of economic freedom, meaning that a hypothetical government that engaged in interventionist practices to temper inflation would score higher on economic freedom in regards to this particular metric than a hypothetical government that refrained from engaging in interventionist practices to curb a relatively higher degree of inflation. The Index of Economic Freedom is not just a measurement of this sort of libertarian notion of economic freedom, but to a large extent is just a measurement of effective governance and even just good economic outcomes (as opposed to laws or policies).
shang_yang_gang_ t1_j7c7ahe wrote
Reply to Economic freedom (Index of Economic Freedom) vs Income inequality (Gini coefficient) in 153 countries [OC] by Independent-Ad-514
It is worth pointing out what exactly the "Index of Economic Freedom" is measuring, however. If you take a look at the methodology you will notice many curious things about it - the index includes many measurements of effective governance that are not directly related to what laws or policies are on the books or what people talk about when they typically talk about "economic freedom" (as in to what degree is the government corrupt and to what degree is the government capable of enforcing the laws and policies it has on the books, or to what degree are economic transactions inhibited not necessarily by any formal restriction on it but by the government's inability to secure said transactions). Furthermore, the methodology even goes so far as to simply take economic outcomes that are more or less universally viewed as good and treat their presence as constituting economic freedom - a very specific example would be inflation, where a weighted average rate of inflation over the past three years is factored in to their measurement of economic freedom, meaning that a hypothetical government that engaged in interventionist practices to temper inflation would score higher on economic freedom in regards to this particular metric than a hypothetical government that refrained from engaging in interventionist practices to curb a relatively higher degree of inflation. The Index of Economic Freedom is not just a measurement of this sort of libertarian notion of economic freedom, but to a large extent is just a measurement of effective governance and even just good economic outcomes (as opposed to laws or policies).