In October 1986, with support
from the Liberty Fund in Indianapolis, Indiana, the Fraser Institute convened
the first of four conferences in Napa Valley, California. The Fraser Institute published the
proceedings in 1988, Economic Freedom,
Democracy and Welfare. Edited by
Michael A. Walker, Director of The Fraser Institute, and co-chaired with Milton
and Rose Friedman, the conference was organized as a counterpart to do for
economic freedom what Freedom House did for political freedom: to calculate the amount of economic freedom that
exists in various nations of the world.
Its origins can be traced to
a conversation in 1984 at the Mont Pelerin Meeting in Cambridge, England, between
Michael Walker and Milton Friedman, whose book Capitalism and Freedom had been extant since 1962. However, there had been no serious attempt to
explore the relationship between economic and political freedom in a scholarly
way. That conversation led to the idea
of broadening the analysis to also include civil freedoms, which can often be
more important than political freedoms.
The conference consisted of
several conceptual, historical, and statistical papers, most notably those
Nobel Laureates in Economics Douglass C. North and Milton Friedman. These were fleshed out with case studies on economic
freedom in East Asia (Alvin Rabushka), Africa (Lord Peter Bauer), Latin America
(Ramon Diaz), and Sweden (Ingemar Stahl).
Another paper dealt with property rights (Svetozar Pejovich). Discussants included Armen Alchian, Walter
Block, Herbert J. Grubel, Arnold Harberger, Brian Kantor, Assar Lindbeck,
Michael Parkin, Gordon Tullock, and Sir Alan Walters. It would be hard to find a more distinguished
group of scholars concerned with economic freedom, or any other economic
subject for that matter.
A second conference was
convened in July 1988 in Vancouver, Canada.
Edited by Walter E. Block, the proceedings were published in 1991, Economic Freedom: Toward a Theory of Measurement. (The volume is available for free download on
my website alvinrabushka.com.) This
conference was designed to set forth the philosophical foundations of economic
freedom and its conceptual definition that would provide a basis for
measurement.
Michael Walker set the
background for the proceedings with a summary of the preceding conference held
in Napa Valley. Alvin Rabushka wrote the
next three papers: “Philosophical
Aspects of Economic Freedom,” “Freedom House Survey of Economic Freedoms“ (for
comparative purposes), and “Preliminary Definition of Economic Freedom.” I will discuss the contents of these papers
in subsequent posts. The final paper was
an initial attempt by Zane Spindler and Laurie Still to calculate “Economic Freedom
Rankings” for 145 countries on a five-point scale based on Rabushka’s
“Definition” paper.
Conference participants, in
alphabetical order, also included James Ahiakpor, David Friedman, Milton
Friedman, Rose Friedman, James Gwartney, William Hammett, Henri LePage, Henry
Manne, Richard McKenzie, Antonio Martino, Charles Murray, Ellen Paul, Robert
Poole, and Gerard Radnitsky.
The third and fourth
conferences were held in Banff, Alberta, Canada in 1989, and Sea Ranch,
California in 1990. The two were melded
into the third volume in The Fraser Institute Rating Economic Freedom
Project. Stephen T. Easton and Michael
A. Walker edited the volume, Rating
Global Economic Freedom, published in 1992.
Papers in this volume focused
on more precise measures of economic freedom for countries around the world for
which data were available.
Authors and participants
included James C.W. Ahiakpor, Juan F. Bendfelt, Walter E. Block, Jack L. Carr,
John F. Chant, Edward H. Crane, Arthur T. Denzau, Thomas J. DiLorenzo, Stephen
T. Easton, Milton Friedman, John C. Goodman, James D. Gwartney, Edward Lee
Hudgins, Ronald W. Jones, Robert A. Lawson, Richard McKenzie, Joanna F. Miyake,
Charles Murray, Alvin Rabushka, Richard W. Rahn, Alan Reynolds, Laurie Rubner,
Gerard W. Scully, Bernard H. Siegan, Zane A. Spindler, Alan C. Stockman,
Richard L. Stroup, Melanie Tammen, and Michael A. Walker.
The first comprehensive
report based on the four conferences and three conference volumes was Walter
Block, James Gwartney, and Robert A. Lawson, Economic Freedom of the World, 1975-1995, published on January 1,
1996. Thereafter subsequent annual
reports were published for 1997, 1998-1999, and
then annually through 2018 (published in conjunction with the Cato Institute
since 2001). Separate periodic reports
for North America were published from 2002 and for the Arab World from
2005. Altogether, about a dozen
individuals have helped to edit the series of annual reports on Economic Freedom.
In 1995, The Heritage
Foundation, in conjunction with the Wall Street Journal, created a rival Index of Economic Freedom. The Heritage/WSJ index was conceptually and
empirically simpler than the Fraser Index.
Subsequent posts in this
series will discuss in greater detail the philosophy, concepts, and measures of
Economic Freedom that make up the Fraser Institute Annual Report.
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