Economic freedom ranking of 161 countries in year 2000: A minimum disagreement approach

Since 1995, the Heritage Foundation has published the economic freedom index for countries throughout the world. The fundamental challenge is how to objectively measure economic freedom so that the index can be fair, credible and has the least disagreements among all countries. In this paper, we propose a new approach to construct economic freedom ranking which minimizes disagreements among countries. The mathematical model consists of two stages: (1) calculate the set of weights for each country which would give each country the best ranking, and (2) aggregation of ranks from all countries to minimize their disagreements. We apply the model to the data set of year 2000 on Economic Freedom from the Heritage Foundation, and find that the minimum disagreements from the proposed ranking improves by 9%.