FREE MARKETS

FREE MARKETS Hong Kong and Singapore are the freest economies in the world, according to the latest index prepared by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative American think-tank, and the Wall Street Journal. Their “index of global economic freedom” ranks countries on the basis of ten indicators that purport to show how government intervention can restrict the economic relations between individuals: trade policy, taxation, monetary policy, the banking system, foreign-investment rules, property rights, the share of economic output consumed by the government, regulation policy, the size of the black market and the extent of wage and price controls. A country can score between 1 (most free) and 5 in each of these categories.