Global economic freedom during the second year of the pandemic

Abstract

This note updates a measure of lockdown regulatory freedom for 2021 and then uses it to adjust countries' 2021 economic freedom scores to account for pandemic regulations that impact economic freedom but otherwise would go unmeasured. We directly follow Miozzi and Powell's (2023a, Journal of Institutional Economics19(2), 229–250) methods to measure lockdown regulations and adjust 2020 economic freedom scores. Thus, when paired with those findings we provide a data set that consistently measures coronavirus disease 2019 regulations and economic freedom over the course of the pandemic that can be used in other research. We find that lockdown regulatory freedom increased as countries scaled back pandemic regulations, while other areas of economic freedom continued declining. We also find that adjusting for lockdown regulatory freedom continues to significantly impact countries' relative ranking in economic freedom.