Trade / economic freedom index
Index of trade openness and broader economic freedom.
Sourced from Heritage Foundation
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The story
Composite freedom indices compress trade openness, regulation, property rights and government size into one score. The US and the EU's northern members score high; the EU average is dragged by its slower reformers; China scores far lower by construction of the method.
Why it matters
Framework conditions are the water innovation swims in. No single regulation decides competitiveness, but a composite drift downward over years is the early warning that the environment is thickening.
Policy context
The sharpest reading for Europe is internal: studies keep finding that the EU's own single-market barriers act like substantial tariffs between member states, friction Europe imposes on itself and could remove without asking anyone's permission.
How this number is calculated
Heritage Foundation Index of Economic Freedom, annual, transcribed from the published dataset. A third-party composite: the methodology and its ideological assumptions are the publisher's, not ours, and it is labeled accordingly. Curated dataset pending; the EU figure requires aggregating member states, which the source does not do natively.
Source & cadence
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