Index of Economic Freedom: UK drops out of top ten

Richard Wellings

20 January 2010

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The news that the UK has dropped out of the top-ten countries in the Index of Economic Freedom should act as a wake-up call to the politicians wishing to form the next government. The country’s score dropped from 79 to 76.5, the second largest fall among the world’s twenty largest economies (only in the USA is economic freedom declining even more rapidly). Worse still, the 2010 Index is based primarily on data from July 2008 to June 2009 – before December’s disastrous Pre-Budget Report and the arbitrary supertax on bankers’ bonuses.

Richard Wellings

Richard Wellings was formerly Deputy Research Director at the Institute of Economic Affairs. He was educated at Oxford and the London School of Economics, completing a PhD on transport and environmental policy at the latter in 2004. He joined the Institute in 2006 as Deputy Editorial Director. Richard is the author, co-author or editor of several papers, books and reports, including Towards Better Transport (Policy Exchange, 2008), A Beginner’s Guide to Liberty (Adam Smith Institute, 2009), High Speed 2: The Next Government Project Disaster? (IEA , 2011) and Which Road Ahead - Government or Market? (IEA, 2012). He is a Senior Fellow of the Cobden Centre and the Economic Policy Centre.