WSI: Political and Economic Freedom

The previous four posts have illustrated the improvement in prosperity spreading across the globe as measured by long life and the soaring improvements in economic status. But there is at least one other measure of prosperity we need to visit. What about political freedom and civil liberties?

At the close of the eighteenth century, the number of democracies in the world could be counted on one hand, representing only a tiny fraction of the world population. By the late nineteenth century, democracy began spreading to more nations. Today, most nations feel obliged to characterize themselves as democracies, regardless of their actual circumstances.

Freedom House has been using various criteria to evaluate nations on their political and civil rights for decades. They rank nations into seven categories but more generally rank them as "free," "partly free," and "not free." I have compared the state of freedom between 1975 and 2005 in the two tables below. Each nation's population at the time was assigned one of the three statuses. Each percentage below is the percentage of people in a designated region with a given status. Pay particular attention to the size of the green bars as they indicate the percentage of people living in "free" countries.

The percentage of the world population living in free countries has soared from 16% to 43% over the last thirty years. Only the Middle East and North Africa region has moved away from freedom. Significant improvements are seen in most other regions of the world.

Next, we turn to a few other general indicators.

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Comments

[phil_style]

Michael,

I'm intersted to know if you've come accross the recent Weathercocks andSignposts report from the WWF (http://www.wwf.org.uk/filelibrary/pdf/weathercocks_report2.pdf)

I'm going to be reviewing this over the next few weeks on my site, but was interested to know if you were going to post on it also, from a more pure market analysis perspective. . . I'd also be interested to know how theology might interact with some of the ideas in the report.

[Michael W. Kruse]

Phil, I was not aware of this piece and have only had time to skim pieces of it. It looks like there is some meaty stuff.

I'll look forward to your posts and maybe later I can comment more intelligently.