Economic Freedom of the Arab World: 2013 Annual Report

This is the tenth 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 2011, the most recent year for which data are available. Looking forward, we also present some early data for 2012 in both the country tables and the country summaries. 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 – 2013).

This year enough data were available to rank 19 nations, up two from last year. However, because of events in Syria, data for 2011 are questionable and we decided not to rank Syria for 2011. Thus, we ranked 18 nations, including Iraq and Sudan for the first time. In addition, in the country tables we supply the data for Syria and at least some data for the four other unranked jurisdictions in the Arab League. The rankings are entirely based on third-party data.