Structure coming up next, the 2023 freedom and prosperity industries. Topic include the relationship between freedom and prosperity, china and russia and womens economic read him around the world. Welcome, everyone to the launch of the 2023 freedom and prosperity indexes. I am the management editor. To give you some brief background on today, the freedom and Prosperity Center near the Atlanta Council aims to increase the wellbeing of people, especially the poor and marginalized of developed countries, a Database Research between prosperity and economic political and legal freedom. We are here to answer questions such as, two countries need freedom . To democracies or hypocrisies have better answers for people around the world . Here to answer these questions is the freedom and prosperity indexer that surveyed nearly every country in the world which we will talk about later today. First, i want to introduce our panelists for today. We have the senior director of the freedom and Prosperity Center who was the state departments special representative for commercial and Business Affairs between 2019 and 2021. In that capacity, he led the gop initiative which promotes business relationships between the u. S. And Foreign Companies around the world. He was also a member of the secretary of states policy and Planning Office between 2018 and 2019 where he was responsible for the economic portfolio. For three decades before that, he held leadership positions on wall street firms where he raised over 15 billion in financing in the United States and abroad, mostly for market economists. 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 ims. Welcome, dan. We also have Joseph Lemoine who is the Deputy Director of the freedom and Prosperity Center. Previously he was private sector specialist at the world bank where he advised governments on policy reform who helped entrepreneurship and shared prosperitys, primarily in africa and the middle east. He also purchased legislation of Development Indicator on the business climate, good regulatory practices, womens entrepreneurship and government transparency. He is the author and coauthor of several publications including worldwide practices of regulatory impasse assessments, survival of firms in developing economy during the crisis and complementary regulations to improve public procurement. Welcome, joseph. Before we begin, we have a brief video explaining more on the freedom and prosperity indexes. We want people to not only have food and shelter, but a good standard of living, education, healthcare, a fair society and a 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 very long time. Some say that free societies produce the best outcomes by unleashing the creativity and talent of individual citizens. Others say that focusing on the individual is too chaotic and ultimately, inefficient but a strong Central Authority produces the best results. The freedom and Prosperity Center at the Atlantic Council, a think tank in washington, d. C. Contributes facts and figures to this debate through our annual freedom and prosperity indexes. 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. We also built a prosperity index to measure income, health, education, the environment, treatment of minorities and inequality 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 tears based on their total scores, free, mostly free, mostly unfree and unfree. In the prosperity index, we rank countries as prosperous, mostly prosperous, mostly and prosperous and and prosperous. We have three Key Takeaways from the resulting data. Our first take away is that there was 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 for freedom are associated with high values for prosperity and low values for freedom are associated with low values for 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 a substantially longer. Citizens of the 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 unevenly distributed among citizens 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 164 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 and prosperity and that is exactly what we find. Countries that increased their freedoms 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 but at the turnofthecentury, peru made a clear turn toward freedom. It is one of the top improvers in our data. In contrast, venezuela shows the largest decrease in freedom of all the countries we cover. Venezuela had a higher prosperity score than peru in 1995 but by 2022, the two countries had switched positions. Our third take away is that autocracy generally fails 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 and three are in the next highest category. None are in the bottom two categories of prosperity. Of the 30 countries ranked at the bottom of our Freedom Index, 11 are in the lowest category of our prosperity index. 17 are in the next lowest category and just two in the most three prosperous categories. None are in the top prosperity category. Our indexes demonstrate that there is a strong relationship between freedom and prosperity and 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 freedom and prosperity indexes. The interactive capabilities of the website allow you to compare detailed data across time for countries and regions. All our indexes, information, and our 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 . Thank you. This is the most important question. Is humanity better off with this index system . There is no other Freedom Index like ours. There were excellent economic Freedom Indexes. Heritage is one. There is political treatment index that people know and love. Of course, this project has a legal Freedom Index. We put this all together and we have some indexes for each of these dimensions of freedom economic policies, for better analysis. Having a comprehensive Freedom Index with the sub 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, measure just three dimensions, gdp, which is material wealth, education, and health. We go beyond that and measure inequality, the environment and the treatment of minorities, which we mentioned with religious freedom. Most importantly, what is unique about that is the purpose behind creating these indexes. By having them with companion indexes, the Freedom Index and the prosperity index, we can study the interrelationship between the two. We want to see if we are right in the premise that we want to explore, which is that countries 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 house this data is compiled . We have 164 countries and 28 years of data 1995 to 2022. We do not collect the data. We use data from institutions that are reputable and have been used and approved by the national committee. That includes the world bank, the u. N. , the world inequality database. We have 10 sources that we primarily use. Like dan was saying, we have different indicators. Total would be 19 indicators from 10 sources for a total of 100,000. I go back to, why are we doing this . Having this data, having this conversation and having data for every single country for every single year allow us to do this research, to look at how freedom and prosperity interacts. Data is a great thing but how can we use this in real life . The important thing to understand is that one of the things that we can do is make the case that totalitarian countries are not for their people. It is one of the big debates in our time, given that china and russia claim to have a Development Model that other countries should follow. We did an analysis for that. We can show that countries, when comparable to both china and russia, develop faster when they chose freedom rather than the countries that were not. In general, the way we want to make the case is by engaging with both people and the Civil Society, think tanks and developing countries that want to go to the government and make the case that their country should have more freedom in order to achieve more prosperity. For that, we get something called the reform grant. We give money to think tanks that go to the government to make the case. We work also with people in government who are interested in understanding the levers that they can use to improve the lot of the people and give them benchmarks by using our analysis. Joseph, 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, look at our data. There is a lot of conversation about the democratic fact finding. By having this aggregated data, we can pin it down to what is happening. From 1995 to 2012, both freedom and prosperitys were going up. 2012, freedom started to decline. We have indexes so we can go into what is happening. Economic freedom is still going up, all the way to covid and then declining to what we know. It was Political Freedom and legal freedoms that is declining. If you look at prosperity, how freedom and prosperity interact, 1995 to 2012, prosperity is almost a Straight Line and it is the growth of the year in points. We have a scale from zero to 100. Consistent growth, 20 2012, it flattens. With covid, it starts to decline. A sense of urgency, it has been going on for years, but it is happening. 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 a specific group of countries. There are countries everywhere were democracy and freedom is collapsing. Venezuela is an easy america. We have examples in thailand, russia, belarus, hungary, among the biggest declines. In africa, we have the republic of the congo. It is something that is global in every single region, which makes it hard to pin down the core reason and makes it even more fascinating to me. Are there any talks about china and russia . They are presenting alternative models to western democracies. Lets dig a bit deeper and how did they fare on the indexes . We did this analysis and it is really fascinating because we found parallels between the two. In the case of russia, we have the benefit of an unusual situation where we can have we can do a social experiment. In chemistry, you can have a closed environment. You can analyze something, where you isolate it. It is rare to have it in social sciences but in the case of russia, they were all part of the soviet union. They were all communist countries. They have no Political Freedom. They have no Economic Freedom. After the collapse of the soviet union, russia, on the one hand and the baltics on the other hand, chose different paths. When we looked at where they were on the prosperity spectrum, russia was ahead in 1995. The soviet union fell apart in 1991. Russia was ahead about 10 , compared to the baltics in 1991. By 2022, they were behind by 30 . This is just looking at gdp per capita. Looking at our prosperity index, which is broader, the same picture. They were ahead and then they were behind. The question is, in the prosperity index, the focus went up 1. 2 times. The question is, why . When you look at our Freedom Index, the baltics are ahead of russia by two times. The score in 22 for the baltics was about 80 and the score for russia was about 40. Russia, the freedom core declined between 1995 in 1922 by 20 . It is interesting to look at china because you see something similar. Their Freedom Score is about half of the score for the countries that we take the comparison witches south korea and taiwan. Then, the prosperity score also is for south korea and taiwan. We see 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, they would come from before. Also, they were all dictatorships. South korea and taiwan were military dictatorships but they had Economic Freedom and china was a communist dictatorship. They had neither. Then they developed differently , south korea and taiwan. They have a g and i per capita that is twice that of china. South korea and taiwan escapes the middle income trap, meaning they came from middle income to high Income Countries while china is not. In looking at these two countries, russia and the peoples republic of china, who claim they had a model for development i am remembering the ads that we had in the 90s where three ask, where is the beef . They said, why should we be like you . You are nothing compared with countries if i may compliment, what he is saying is our data, by desegregating Economic Freedom, Political Freedom and legal freedom, we can see how the three interact and see how these 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 freedoms, the rule of law. They had Economic Freedoms and then they implemented Political Freedom and that is what led them to the place they are today. If you look at what china has been doing, which is taking people out of country more than any in history, the switch we dont see the switch and the data. Political freedom is declining in the country. We think that is unfortunate. Maybe there was a missed opportunity here. Beyond china and russia, 162 other countries. Which country made big moves up and down over the last 28 years and what were the consequences of that . So, 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 beirut and beirut has struggles now. Freedom is declining. In the late 90s and early 2000s, implemented pro democracy that led them to cross paths with venezuela. Despite being a country with far less natural resources, they took a position in peru is much more prosperous than what it has been today. What i found fascinating in the data it is easier to increase prosperity than it is to decline prosperity. There are only a few countries that had a negative change from 1995 to 2022. The biggest negative change was venezuela and syria. Syria had the war and venezuela with the governor. The insight of declining freedom over time can be not as bad. It can be similar through that work. We have covered Global Development issues and that includes Civil Society and promotion efforts. Can these indexes be used for americas democracy promotion efforts abroad . This is an excellent question. The answer is yes. Number one, we are not working with the u. S. Government to promote an american agenda in either way. We dont have money from the u. S. Government tort anything. We would like to work more with agencies. We have been meeting with them but we have not designed them to promote anything. Having said that, we have an extraordinary moment in time and our indexes and the reports show tonight, it can be an excellent tool to make the case not just for the United States but for the free world in general toward a Better Future for all humanity. Let me elaborate on that. It became very clear after the invasion of ukraine by russia is that groups of countries have emerged that are very clearly defined. You have the group of authoritarian country, russia and china. Iran, north korea, venezuela, cuba, the chinese are putting spy stations against the United States. That is one grouping of coun