According to a Wall Street Journal survey European economies are some of the freest in the world and getting more so. The rankings are worth a look.
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Who’d a thunk it…November 14th, 2002 |
 5 comments to Who’d a thunk it… |
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Counting Hong Kong and Singapore, seven of the top ten are Anglosphere nations.
Meanwhile, Germany is ranked at 19, Italy at 29, and France is at a dismal 40, behind the likes of El Salvador, Botswana, and Cambodia.
This seems less to vindicate European economies than to confirm what we all already know.
Dammit. Grumpy, tired and still can’t sleep.
Interesting info. I note, though, that most of the European countries cited are outside of the Eurozone and/or not in the EU at all.
The absence of France, Germany, Italy, Spain etc from top rankings is telling.
Former Communist country Estonia has everybody in Europe beat except for Denmark (which ties it at 6th place), to-hell-with-the-EU-we’re-cutting-taxes Ireland, and
the Duchy of Grand FenwickLuxembourg. Even Latvia and Lithuania are ahead of, well, France.Message to the Baltic States: If y’all want to keep your economies healthy, stay out of the EU. You’ll accomplish a lot more by dealing with INAEE (Island Nations Against Euroweenie Economics)members Singapore, New Zealand, and Ireland.
I would also point out the interesting omission of Somalia, where a well known libertarian set up shop some years ago. I’ve been led to believe it has the nearest thing to total laissez faire on this planet but only have anecdotal information to that effect.
It may be their polling mechanism has a built in flaw: it may requires a certain level of government to gather the raw data, in which case we would posit another category above the ones on their list, “Economies so free we can’t get anyone to measure it unless we pay them a bloody fortune”
Dale:
You raise an interesting question: this table is based on government collected and published statistics.
What is the quality of this data, it’s reliability, it’s credibility ? Can data be compared ? It is known that statistics published by communist regimes are lies. Souldn’t we assume that most of the data gathered by those 170 governments is unreliable if not intentionaly falsified ?