The results of the 2001 Edition of the Economic Freedom of the World.
Few of you intend to spend much time learning new terms and memorizing formulas. You don’t like the idea of getting lost in details that concern only professional economists. What you want are summaries of economic issues that really matter – those that help you make better personal choices and improve your understanding of the complex world we all live in. And you want these summaries to be presented clearly and precisely, with a bare minimum of economic jargon. This little book aims to achieve these two goals.
The findings of this paper show a strong and persistent negative relationship between government expenditures and growth of GDP, both for the developed economies of the OECD and for a larger set of 60 nations around the world. After several decades of declining growth rates, the conventional wisdom is that high-income developed economies can no longer achieve and sustain real growth rates of 3.5 percent and higher. The evidence presented in this paper provides another view. More rapid growth is possible, but the higher potential growth can only be achieved if we are willing to reduce the relative size of government.
