Economic Freedom of the Arab World: 2012 Annual Report

This is the ninth report on economic freedom in the Arab world and is published in conjunction with the International Research Foundation (IRF) of Oman and the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Liberty.

The Economic Freedom of the Arab World report compares and ranks Arab nations in five areas of economic freedom: size of government, including expenditures, taxes, and enterprises; commercial and economic law and security of property rights; access to sound money; freedom to trade internationally; and regulation of credit, labour, and business.

The index in this edition adds data for 2010, the most recent year for which data are available. As well, the scores for previous years have been re-calculated using revised data from the World Bank for its Doing Business and World Development Indicators databases. Economic Freedom of the Arab World is modeled on the annual reports in the series, Economic Freedom of the World (Gwartney and Lawson, 2004–2009; Gwartney, Hall, and Lawson, 2010; Gwartney, Lawson, and Hall, 2011 – 2012).

The report measures available data on economic freedom in 22 nations of the League of Arab States, but due to data limitations, calculations of the overall level of economic freedom are only available for 16 jurisdictions: Algeria, Bahrain, Comoros, Djibouti, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, and UAE. The rankings are entirely based on third-party data.