With the possible exception of a few extreme environmentalists, everyone agrees that robust long-run growth is a key to a better society.

An unprecedented jump in growth, for instance, is what enabled the western world to escape poverty, resulting in the famous “hockey stick” of modern prosperity.

Maintaining growth is an ongoing challenge for developed countries, to be sure, and it’s also vitally important to help developing nations grow and prosper.

Which is why policymakers should focus on the policies that generate good outcomes.

Libek, a think tank in Serbia, has released a study on this topic. They start by pointing out that we now have some good measures of economic liberty in various nations.

…the Economic Freedom in the World Index in 1996 by the Fraser Institute…was the first methodological tool that measured intrusion in functioning of the market process by government entities, either directly through government intervention or indirectly though regulation and market institutions. A similar index, Index of Economic Freedom, produced by the Wall Street Journal and the Heritage Foundation soon followed… Since this very successful tool was invented, it has been widely employed in empirical studies…, the most important were concerning the role of economic freedom in fostering economic growth. …empirical studies mostly concluded that there is a significant connection between economic freedom and economic growth.

Since I’m always citing the Fraser Index and the Heritage Index, I agree that these are very helpful sources of data.

And lots of academics also use those numbers.

So Libek took a close look at this wealth of empirical research.

Libek conducted a metastudy regarding economic freedom in December 2017, with the aim to reexamine the connection between economic freedom and economic growth in published empirical studies. …Using Google scholar mechanism…92 studies…consider the connection between economic freedom and economic growth. Out of these, a predominant majority of 86 studies (93.5%) finds a positive correlation or connection between them, while only 6 studies (6.5%) have less positive results. …This metastudy shows that empirical studies have predominantly found that economic freedom is associated with higher economic growth rates, while there is only one study claim otherwise and results of other 5 are less conclusive. This high rate of concurrence between economists is highly unusual, given the fact that economist tend to often disagree even among theoretically more accepted topics. Therefore, it is conclusively shown that higher level of economic freedom, ceteris paribus, leads to higher economic growth.