Economic Freedom's Slow Road Of Progress

The Heritage Foundation released its Index of Economic Freedom last week. While most of such broad indices and studies should be taken with grain of salt, I think relative comparison between countries and the trend over a period of time are worth look at. Apparently the methodology for calculate the index has changed for 2007 rankings.

India is still in the mostly unfree countries cohort with a rank of 104 out of 157 countries ranked with Hong Kong, Singapore, and Australia leading the pack of nations.

India's Score Over Twelve Years

India's Indicators In 2007

Looking at the pattern of scores, over the past twelve years, shows the slow progress India is making in freeing up its economy although the gap between global average and India's score is narrowing. We, at least, seem to be catching up to Asia's average score. The ten criteria show the obvious, even to a casual observer - poor scoring in business, trade, investment, financial, and corruption relative to global average. Progress on almost all of them came to a crawl during the UPA administration in the past three years, with the exception of, perhaps, investment.