Launch of the 2023 freedom and prosperity index. I am the managing editor. Just to give you some brief background on today, the freedom and Prosperity Center here at the Atlantic Council aims to increase the wellbeing of people in developing countries. Through research on the development between prosperity and economic, political, and legal freedom. We seek to answer questions such as to countries need freedom to have prosperity . Does democracy or autocracy serve the aspirations of people around the world . They survey nearly every country in the world. We will talk about that later today. First i want to introduce our panelists. We have the senior director of the freedom and Prosperity Center. He was the state Department Special representative for commercial and Business Affairs from 2019 to 2021. He led the initiative to start a business relations between the u. S. And Foreign Companies around the world. He was on the policy planning between 2018 and 2019 where he was responsible for the economic portfolio. He held leadership positions in wall street firms where he raised over 50 million in financing in the u. S. And abroad. He defected from communist romania, where he had been an official in the ministry of finance, and was involved in negotiating government loans with the world bank and imf. We also have the Deputy Director of the freedom and Prosperity Center. Previously he was a private sector specialist at the world bank where he advised governments on policy reforms that helped entrepreneurship and prosperity primarily in africa and the middle east. He also participated and led the business climate, good regulatory practices, and government transparency. He is the author and coauthor of several publications. Worldwide practices of impact assessments, survival of firms in developing economies and complementary regulations to improve public procurement. Welcome. Before we begin, we have a brief video explaining more on the freedom and prosperity indices. For the world. We want people to not only have food and shelter, but a good standard of living, education, health care, fair society and clean environment. That is what we mean by prosperity. But, what is the surest path to prosperity . Academics, policymakers and citizens have been debating this matter for a long time. Some say that free societies produce the best outcomes by unleashing the creativity and talent of individual citizens. Others say focusing on the individual is too chaotic and ultimately inefficient. A strong Central Authority produces the best results. The freedom and Prosperity Center of the Atlantic Council, a think tank in washington, d. C. , contributes facts and figures to the debate. We built a Freedom Index to measure economic, political and legal freedom in 164 countries. Each score reflects measurements of several indicators. Together, they create a comprehensive and unique measurement of freedom. In the same 164 countries. A Prosperous Society should be judged on more than just income per capita. Our index gives us a holistic view of prosperity. In the Freedom Index, we rank countries into four tiers based on their total scores. Pre, mostly free, mostly unfree and free. In the prosperity index, we rank countries as prosperous, mostly prosperous, mostly on prosperous and on prosperous. We have three Key Takeaways from the resulting data. Our first take away, there is a strong correlation between our freedom and prosperity scores. We show a 0. 8 correlation between a countrys scores in the two indexes. This means high values of freedom are associated with high values for prosperity. Low values for freedom are associated with low values of prosperity. On average, the freer the country, the higher it will score in all six measures of prosperity. The income scores show that free countries are far and away the richest. People born in free countries are also healthier and live substantially longer. Citizens of freer countries have access to better education and spend more time learning. The environment scores indicate that freer countries have cleaner environments. Unfree societies are less equal. Wealth is more unevenly distributed and unsurprisingly, unfree countries are also less tolerant. This leads to our second take away, evidence suggests that freedom contributes to prosperity. We examined for our sample of 100 64 countries the correlation between changes in freedom and changes in prosperity over time. If freedom is really driving prosperity, an improvement in freedom would be strongly associated with an improvement in prosperity. That is exactly what we find. Countries that increased their freedom the most are the ones where prosperity increased the most. Peru and venezuela are prime examples. In 1995, venezuela was a freer country than peru. At the turnofthecentury, peru made a clear turn toward freedom. It is one of the top improvers of our data. In contrast, venezuela shows the largest decrease in freedom of all the countries to cover. Venezuela had a higher prosperity score than peru in 1995. By 2022, the two countries had switched positions. Our third take away is autocracies generally fail to deliver prosperity for their people while free countries succeed. Of the 30 countries ranked at the top of our freedom rankings, 27 are in the top category of our prosperity index. Three are in the next highest. None are in the bottom two categories of prosperity. Of the 30 countries ranked at the bottom of our index, 11 are in the lowest category of our index. 17 are in the next and just two in the mostly prosperous category. None are in the top prosperity category. Our indexes demonstrate there is a strong relationship between freedom and prosperity. We have reason to believe that improvements in freedom will, over time, lead to greater and more durable prosperity. Please visit the website for the Atlantic Councils freedom and prosperity indexes. The interactive capabilities of the website allow you to compare detailed data across time for countries and regions. All of our indexes, information and annual reports can be downloaded for further analysis. Dan, lets start with you, there are lots of indexes out there, including many that measure freedom. What makes this one unique . This is probably the most important question, why is humanity better off with the index them before the index. There is no other Freedom Index like ours. There are excellent economic Freedom Indexes. Heritage has one, frazier has one. Theres a political Freedom Index that we all know and love, the freedom housing index that we refer to. The Justice Project has indexes. We put them all together and have some indexes for each of these dimensions of freedom. Economic, political and legal, for better analysis. Having a comprehensive Freedom Index is unique. The prosperity index is also unique in the sense that other measurements of prosperity like the Human Development index of the world bank, or the United Nations, measure just three dimensions. Gdp, which is material wealth, education and health, but we go beyond that and also measure inequality, the environment and to treatment of minorities, which would measure with religious freedom. Most importantly what is unique about us is the purpose behind creating these indexes. I having them as companion indexes, Freedom Index and prosperity index, we can study the interrelationship between we want to see if we are right the two. In the premise that we want to explore, which is that countries that have more freedom also have more prosperity. This is what sets us apart. Given how comprehensive these indexes are, they require a lot of data. Can you talk about how the data was compiled . You saw in the video, we have 164 countries and 28 years of data from 1995 until 2022. We do not collect the data, we collect data from approved by the international community. That includes the world bank, the u. N. , the world inequality database, among others. We have 10 sources we primarily use. Like dan was saying, we have different indicators. In total, 19 indicators from 10 sources for a total of 100,000 data points. Where are we doing this goes back to what dan was saying, having this data, this coverage and having data for every single country for every single year, allows us to do the research to actually look at how freedom and prosperity interact. Dan, data is a great thing. How can we use this in real life . The important thing to understand is that one of the things we can do is make the case that authoritarian countries are not delivering for their people. It is one of the big debates of our time, given that china and russia claim to have a Development Model that other countries should follow. We did an analysis for that and we can show that countries that were comparable to both china and russia develop faster when they chose freedom, rather than the authoritarian. In general, the way we want to make the case is by engaging with both people in Civil Society, think tanks in developing countries that want to go to their governments and make the case that there countries should have more freedom and order to achieve more prosperity. For that, we teamed up with the Atlas Network to get something we call the roll form grant. We give money to think tanks that go to governments and make the case. We work also with people in government who are interested in understanding the levers they can use to improve and give them benchmarks by using our analysis. 2012 seems to stand out as a pivotal year. What happened in that year . We do all of this work and you might ask, why should we care . Today if you look at our data, freedom is declining. Theres lots of conversations about democratic backsliding. By having this desegregated data, we can pin it down to actually what is happening. From 1995 to 2012, both freedom and prosperity were going up. In 2012, freedom started to decline. Economic freedom is still going up, although covid. But it was Political Freedom and legal freedom, rule of law is declining. If you look at prosperity, you saw the video that freedom and prosperity interact. From 90 from 1995 to 2012, it is most a straight line. It is a growth of about 0. 4 a year. We have a scale from zero to 100. Starting 2012, it flattened. With covid, it starts to decline. There is a sense of urgency that has been going on for 10 years. What i find fascinating in this data, because we have the entire world, we can see that it is not a phenomenon that is specific to a certain region or group of countries, there are countries everywhere were democracy and freedom is collapsing. Venezuela is an easy example, but we have an example in thailand, russia, belarus, hungary. In africa we have mali. It is something that is global, in every region, which makes it hard to pin down the core reason , which makes it more fascinating to me. You talked about china and russia and of course they are preventing alternative models to western democracy. Lets dig deeper, how did they fare in the indexes . We did this analysis and it is fascinating because we found parallels between the two. In the case of russia, we have the benefit of an unusual situation in social sciences where we can do a social experiment. In physics or chemistry, you can have a closed environment and you can analyze something where you isolated. It is rare to have it in social sciences, but in the case of russia and the baltics, they were all part of the soviet union. They were all communist countries. They had no Political Freedom, no Economic Freedom. After the collapse of the soviet union, russia on the one hand and the baltics on the other chose different paths in terms of prosperity. When we looked at where they were on the prosperity spectrum, russia was ahead in 1995. The soviet union fell apart in 1991 and russia was ahead about 10 . Compared to the baltics in 1991. By 2022, they were behind 30 . This is just looking at gdp per capita. Looking at our prosperity index, the same picture. They were ahead, then they fell behind. The question is why . In the prosperity index the baltics were up by 1. 2 times. The question is why . When you look at our freedom next, russia, the baltics are ahead of russia by two times. The score in 2022 baltics was about 80 and the score for russia was about 40. Russia, their Freedom Scored a client between 1995 and 2022 by 30 . It is interesting to look at china because you see something similar. Their Freedom Score also is about half of the score for the countries we picked for a comparison which is south korea and taiwan. The prosperity score is also ahead for south korea and taiwan. We see in both of these cases, countries that started from a similar point. In the case of south korea and taiwan and the peoples republic of china, in the Second World War they were comparably poor. They were all dictatorships. South korea and taiwan were military dictatorships, but they had Economic Freedom. John china had neither. Then they developed differently. South korea and taiwan have a gni per capita which is twice that of china. South korea and taiwan escaped the middle income trap, meaning they moved from middle income to high income countries, while china did not. In looking at these two countries, russia and the peoples republic of china, who claimed they have a model for development, i am inspired. I am remembering the ad we had in the 1990s where the lady asked, wheres the beef . They said, why should we be like you . You are not come for you are not performing compared to other countries. By desegregating Economic Freedom and Political Freedom, we can see how the three interact and see how they lead to prosperity. The recipe that works the best is the three of them together. In the case of taiwan and south korea, they had legal freedom, rule, economica Economic Freedom, then they implemented democracy which led them to where they are today. To add what china has been achieving, which is taking people out of poverty more than any other country, but the switch. We do not see the switch in the data. When xi jinping took office, Political Freedom is declining as he is taking a grip on the country. Which we think is unfortunate because maybe there was a missed opportunity here. Staying with you, beyond china and russia, 100 62 other countries, which countries made big moves up and down over the last 28 years and what were the consequences . I like to compare things to make them interesting. The biggest freedom decline or is venezuela. We saw in the video that in 1995, venezuela was far more free and far more prosperous than peru. Peru has its struggles now, but in the late 1990s and early 2000s, they implemented prodemocracy reforms that actually led them to cross with venezuela. Just by being a country with far less natural resources, they switched position and peru is more prosperous than what venezuela is today. What i found fascinating in the data, the good news is that it is easier to increase prosperity than it is to decline prosperity. Only a few countries had a negative change from 1995 to 2022. The biggest negative change was and the second was venezuela. Syria had a civil war. The impact of declining freedom over time can be not as bad. It can be similar to that of the civil war. Covering Global Development issues including Civil Society and democracy promotion, can these indexes be used for americas democracy promotion efforts abroad . Excellent question. The answer is yes, with several caveats. Number one, we are not working with the u. S. Government to promote an american agenda in any way. We dont take money from the u. S. Government. We would like to work more with agencies. We recently had a meeting with a u. S. Agency devoted to National Development but we have not designed them to promote anything in the agenda of the u. S. Government. Having said that, we are at an extraordinary moment in time and i think our indexes and reports chosen tonight can be an excellent tool to make the case not just for the United States, but for the free world in general, towards a Better Future for humanity. Let me elaborate. What became clear after the invasion of ukraine by russia is that groups of countries have emerged that are clearly defined. You had a group of authoritarian countries, russia, china and iran, north korea, venezuela, cuba where the chinese are putting spy stations against United States. That is one group of countries. But then, following the ukraine war, the free world and by the way, the terminology of the previous cold war is coming back in fashion. The free world also very democracies in europe, japan, south korea, australia, new zealand and so on. But then there is an entire other group of countries, referred to variously as the global south, which i dont like the term because geography has nothing to do with it. I prefer the term and i also heard the term swing countries. Those are important countries like india, south africa, brazil and mexico, that are not as strongly opposed to the extraordinary violation of the United Nations principles by russia as the free world countries. They are taking a position that they want to be nonaligned. In many respects. The indexes work can help the government and the people of the United States as well as the government and people in the free world in general, to make the case to the countries of the nonalliance movement that more freedom leads to more prosperity. Therefore, they should increase freedom on their side and also coalesce at opposing aggression everywhere. It is in this sense, that our work can help. Ergo you should play around with the date on our website. You can look at the global trend of freedom and prosperity. We did an analysis to see those countries that were better off in 1995. Of the countries that crossed the global trend, meaning they are missing the train, brazil, south korea and the philippines. In all of those countries, freedom has been stagnating. Does that surprise you . Syria had a civil war. Venezuela had nicolas maduro. Were there other countries that surprise you as results came in . There are 100,000 data points and we are only scratching the surface. We created this framework as an assumption. You do an exercise of testing what you think is the right answer my and it might not be. That it is pretty spectacular how strong all of those links we found in the data are, so we had interesting conversations. For example, colleagues and the Atlantic Council and other looked at the United States and said, wheres the United States . Frankly, we didnt worry about that. I think it is 17 in prosperity and 11 im sorry 17 in freedom and 11 and prosperity. It is free and prosperous. And then you can see people who are more on the left to say, how come it is so high . People on the right say, how it is so low . There are people who wanted to know where israel ranked. And did they have a position on freedom in israel. And they wonder why israel ranks so high in freedom. Same with singapore. On singapore, there is an interesting discussion to be had. It is one of the exceptions to the rule that countries that have imperfect freedoms tend not to rank well in terms of prosperity. But the way we define freedom is an average between economic, political and legal freedoms. So, it is possible that singapore will not rank very well in Political Freedom, but rank very well in economic and legal freedom. When you average the total score for freedom, it is very high. So, these are the three countries where we had some conversations. If we get back to trends and patterns, which i like to, something that is not a surprise but an encouragement, the indicator that saw the greatest progress by huge margins is womens Economic Freedoms. Over the entire sample between 1995 and 2022, 18 Percentage Points increase over the sample. This is true across all regions. Some started behind than others. Every region looking at the sample improved womens economic rights. But another thing i found encouraging, obviously for this work, africa is extremely important. The largest growing populations across the whole continent. The region is the region where prosperity grew the most. Obviously they are still behind, but it is happening. What i think is encouraging, it is also the region that saw the largest growth of freedom. We are hopeful that if this continues, if this improvement on freedom is sustained, that will lead to improvements in prosperity longterm. Now a question for each of you. Weve talked about some of the progress and positives that were made, being a journalist i had to look at the critical viewpoints, so the negatives i suppose now the silver lining. I would go back to this womens Economic Freedom thing. I think it was really one of the most heartwarming things. It is also one of the most consequential pairs that consequential. In an ideal society, 50 of the population dont contribute to Human Flourishing because they cannot fully participate in economic life. It is such a use problem. When we look at trends, sometimes they are clear. Sometimes they are not. Sometimes they go up, then they go down. But this one indicator, which is the Economic Freedom indicator, women in business, it is a straight up line. It is such a great thing to see. It is on par, i would say, to the tremendous numbers we saw of people escaping abject poverty over the past 20 years. People living on less than two dollars a day. It is on an equal scale, the recognition that women should participate. That was one of the things i was most happy about. Something i mentioned earlier as well, it is much harder to decline in prosperity than it is to increase. We tend to live longer and be wealthier in capitalist societies. A good example of this is the score for russia, where obviously freedom is collapsing. Today, they rank 138 out of 164. But they are still mostly prosperous, ranking 63 out of 164. Because in 1995, they were in a good place. It is not going in the right direction, but that was something that i found interesting, that you need freedom to move forward and russia needs a lot more. But if a country goes to a terrible path, there is hope to recover and go back on the right path. On that note, always good to have positive perspective, i wanted to open it up to the floor for any questions we might have. Theres a microphone there. If you could introduce yourself. We also have online, we have online questions if anyone virtually would like to submit questions. Your microphone should be on. Center for International Private enterprise. Thank you for the report on these important topics. The trend in womens Economic Freedom is one that really does jump out in this report and was partly unexpected to me. I have seen many examples of women in business leading and pioneering and doing new things, but other things i look at might not be so promising like investment in womenowned businesses, or the state of womens Property Rights. Can you elaborate on what you are picking up on that trendline . I dont know how to elaborate. We picked up an index i think from the world bank. So, again, all of our indexes cover 100 six e4 countries between 1995 and 2022. What we are always about doing is use data which are consistently provided from the same source with the same methodology and we trust the work of the world bank. We also want to have data that is available from all countries. Over this period of time, we looked at this one index produced by the world bank and got this result. One of the things that are important to note, and i think that is where your note of caution comes, in some regions, the slope is much more positive than other regions. For example, in the middle east, we have in the middle east and north africa region, the way we divided the world in seven regions, progress is less impressive but it is still positive. In other countries, it is more impressive. If i could complement, there is no good data on the reality of implementation of laws when it comes to women. The data we use witches where my good friend at the world bank produced it, this report is based on laws and regulations. It is not the practice, its the regulation. We took all of the components that were measured by the other indicators we had in the Economic Freedom sub index. What we measured under womens Economic Freedom was mobility, the ability to move freely, pay, measuring the wage gap, entrepreneurship constraints that are added when you are a woman and want to create a business, and assets. I know they are actually starting to create a new project that will look at the actual practice, but it is a multiyear endeavor. Right now, the best we could do is look at the law and regulation. We have some virtual questions here. As a scholar, how can i secure funding in order to make use of the fascinating index in my research . Especially if i want to study particular countries and may need to travel to gather more data. We should direct this question to the gentleman who is at the microphone right now. No pressure. No pressure. We are helping scholars, individual scholars in academia and we are helping think tanks around the world. With a strong preference toward developing countries. In partnership with two wonderful organizations. One of them is the Atlas Network and the ceo of the Atlas Network wants to ask a question. He is normally shy, so it will, naturally. Through them, we have given eight grants to think tanks in eight different countries, totaling about 200,000. The other organization is the action institute. With them, we are giving grants to scholars, individual scholars, right scholarly papers and publish them, or work with us to help reduce this. Bibby you want to elaborate how exactly they can apply . Didnt expect to be doing it plug. First of all, i am grateful to stan and joseph are putting together what i think is a valuable tool. The independent think tanks we work with all around the world are using this to inform some of their work about what kind of policy priorities they should have to move in a direction that allows more freedom and how to make that case backed by empirical data. The Atlas Network welcomes grant applications and we partner with atlas and the Atlantic Council to award organizations that can carry out Meaningful Research and reform agenda work. At this network. Org. If i could put in my question, one of the things i am curious more correlated with improvements on the prosperity side of the index . I am wondering if theres a way to talk about the sample in general. Or, i imagine countries at Different Levels of development would benefit from prioritizing different parts of the freedom spectrum. The report is for the general audience who are also working on the more academic paper where we will present findings. In the video you saw, we presented the correlation between Freedom Index and indicators from the prosperity index. Here, we saw a perfect correlation on each one. A freer country will be more rich. People will be more educated and live longer. Minority rights perform better. What we did is its a very good question on the freedom side, the policy side, what you can do as a country to get on the right path to prosperity, the question that we are investigating is the sequencing of reforms. Where do you start and what do you do first and so one. The preliminary findings we did is we tested every single one of these sub indexes against prosperity, controlling for everything else. When you do that, you find the rule of law, legal freedom, is the most strongly correlated with prosperity. Closely followed by Economic Freedom. Third comes Political Freedom. All of them are positive relations. All of them are important. Some just have a stronger relation to the other. What is important to remember is by far the strongest is the three of them together. If you have those three, it will lead you to a Prosperous Society. My to the sequence of reforms, we are looking into this. I will let you know in the paper is ready because it is a huge endeavor. There is very Fascinating Research questions in there. We have another question online. Can you please discuss the case of saudi arabia . With a poor Freedom Index and high prosperity. Other countries you mentioned, singapore and the uae, where there is not the incongruity. The interesting question always in defining freedom and prosperity for our indexes is to step back from what people normally assume we are thinking of. When we talk to people about freedom, the first thought is always Political Freedom. But when we talk about freedom, we think about Economic Freedom, Political Freedom and legal freedom together. When we talk about prosperity, people often think about gdp per capita, which is just material. But we always think about it holistically. Saudi arabia falls into a category which is special. We want to analyze this separately. Countries very rich in natural resources, which as a result of that, ranked very highly, have a very high gdp per capita because of that. Countries like this also will have resources to have good education and health care. Then, they may not rank very well for minority rights, which we measure with religious freedom. So, it is something we want to explore further. Not just for saudi arabia, but other countries in the same category. I am dr. Alexander. I wanted to the United States. Can you speak louder . My name is dr. Alexander. I want to dry reference to the United States where it ranks 20 and 21 on your index sees, and find out what strategies and structures are missing as to why we are in the top 20, just below the top 20, given that education may be a determining factor, how can we improve as a nation to rise to the top . The United States. I want to apologize. I wont give you a good answer. Let me tell you why you wont get a very good answer. The aim of our work is to help the poor and the marginalized everywhere, but especially in developing countries. We have spent a lot less actually, very little. Very little on the United States, canada, western europe, japan, countries that are free and prosperous. We are much more interested in what tools we can give to people in government and outside government in developing countries. We have not spent much time on studying what happens in the United States. But, please come by at the end. I will give you my card. We will do a study just for you and give you the results. It is good for us to spend time. I like to say, i am less interested in i am much more interested in taking a country that is doing poorly 120 and take that country and bring it all the way up to 90. We are not worrying about the countries that are 20, trying to make them 11. They are fine. We are fine for now. [laughter] [indiscernible] the figure 20 and republication, you have mentioned you have data for 164 countries, but in this you have only 77 observations. Could you explain why you have chosen substantially smaller number of observation this figure compares to the whole . This figure you are referring to looks at the impact of changes in freedom and how these correlate with changes in prosperity. We did for the entire sample, found a similar positive relationship. What we did here is we took out the sample in the middle from the changes from minus five to plus five with the idea that these would be the signal. So, these countries are not real movers, we just focused on data strong move positive or negative. Direction. But i guarantee you, in the text we mention it, we did seminars and the relationship holds. Let me tell you the genesis of the chart. What is very easy is to show correlation. So the correlation for these 164 countries is 0. 8. It is very easy to show that countries that are free are also prosperous. But this does not count as much. Correlation does not mean that the does not mean that there is causation. We are interested in causation. We want to make the case that if you have freedom, you also have prosperity. What we tried to do was to say, lets look at countries where we have the most change in freedom and lets see if later, those same countries had the most change in prosperity. There are very few methodological avenues for showing causation. We have a Wonderful Team of experts, academics who advise us and they told us this is one of the most reliable ones. And then we said, lets look not at everybody, but lets look at those with the most change. Does that make sense . That explanation to the text because it is very important. Certainly you could put here in the title that you have only 77 observations instead of 164. The reason why you have limited this particular pool to demonstrate what you are trying to demonstrate. But the second one, much more important because you are not the first two are trying to do this because it is a huge body of literature devoted to this particular issue, probably very well known to use into had mentioned in your introductory remarks the work of economic Freedom Index of institute or heritage foundation, but human using exactly the same methodology for more than 30 years. They are doing this work also using very similar figures, similar tables, similar graphs. Similar conclusions. I think it would be worth mentioning those who did something before you, just on which basis you have built your new product. Based on what they had done, and this youd body of literature they have developed, they showed that there is not such a clear relation between the changes in freedom and changes in prosperity. What is omitted here, for example china, one of the largest countries in the world by economic power, which has declined in freedom, even measured by your approach, and substantial increase in prosperity. That is why this observation would fall into the right lower corner or quadrant of your graph that also would change a little bit your figure. There is no so if you put not absolute values, but changes in the values, like for Freedom Change in prosperity change, there would be no so interesting and attractive picture. For everybody involved in those studies, this is a huge problem to understand why the changes in freedom over the last 20 years or 30 years, did not lead not only in particular cases, but on average, did not show increase in prosperity. That is a very substantial academic issue that has been debated heavily for the last three decades. So far, nobody was able to produce reasonable, acceptable explanations for that. That is why at this moment, not 30 years ago, at this moment it would be helpful to contribute to this debate and produce some ideas why. Why, what we cherish so much like freedom, why is the increase in freedom does not necessarily lead to increase in prosperity in all cases. And even overall. First of all, thank you very much for your contribution. If you would be so kind, give me your card. I would love to have a separate conversation. I am not aware of anyone else doing this analysis the way you claim. I am also not aware of anyone having reaching the conclusion in the body of literature showing the opposite. But i am happy to have a discussion with you. We have time for two very brief questions. Hello. Tran. Im an intern for the house of representatives. I would like to know, what are some prevalent ideologies can you speak louder . I want to know what are some prevalent ideologies specifically that are common within the nations that are considered high prosperity but low freedom. There is always the temptation of making the case that an authoritarian leader can solve problems through decisions that are made quickly by this leader, or a small group of people, and dispensing with all of the niceties like elections, legislators and consultations from the people and all that. There is extensive discussion about that and usually people give the example of singapore. Actually, we talked about it in our report last year, singapore has done very well. If you look at kissingers book on leadership, one of the six great leaders of the 20th century he mentioned. He was influencing the affairs of singapore in one capacity or another for 50 years. The two prime ministers that came afterwards were also excellent. You can have a country that has wonderful leaders for an extended period of time, but you can also have a country that has a horrible leader for 50 years, followed by even worse leaders. There is the temptation that you can have a great leader who will solve all your problems, mussolini famously said he would get the trains run on time. He got italy into war and destroyed the country. The ideology exists and we are not convinced by it, but that is usually what they are saying. One last question. J. P. Hogan, i write about politics. Freedom and prosperity, i get the question is, where is Property Rights . If you have a staterun economy, are you is your prosperity is that the government providing quality of life . Where is the difference between whether you own it or you have access to it . Where are you breaking down that line between the different freedom to own . Freedom of access . I have my cheat sheet here. Property rights is one of the four components of Economic Freedom. Property rights, including we use the freighter index for that. Property rights including are not protected by law. That is the lowest threshold. Or, protected by law, the highest threshold. It is a surveybased index where they ask experts whether property is well defined and protected by all. On that note, we are hitting our time. I want to thank dan and joseph for this very insightful conversation, thinking our audience both in person and virtually for joining us. I encourage you to visit Atlantic Council online. You can learn more about their freedom and prosperity indexes. Thank you very much. [applause] announcer wa