World map

Ideas from the chapters left the page. Estonia copied Friedman's flat-tax and free-trade programme almost word for word; Sweden and Chile adopted his school vouchers; New Zealand invented inflation targeting; Peru titled millions of informal plots on de Soto's advice; Argentina elected a president who quotes Mises and Rothbard. This page maps who adopted what, compares economic freedom with income, and walks through the big reform episodes and their mirror images, where markets were suppressed. All numbers are approximate and rounded, and every success story has costs and controversies, which are noted next to it.

Who follows which ideas

Pick a layer. The first two are outcomes (an economic-freedom score and income per head); the rest are specific policies that came out of liberal thinkers' work. Hover or tap a country for its numbers, which ideas it put into practice, and a one-line story.

Economic freedom (0–10)

≤4 less free8.6 most free

no data / not rated

Fraser-style index: size of government, property rights and courts, sound money, freedom to trade, regulation.

Country (pinned)

Latin America

Chile

Econ. freedom

7.3

rank ≈ 44 of 160

GDP/cap PPP

$31k

~2023, approx.

Avg. tariff: 0.6%
Flat tax: No
Inflation target / indep. CB: Since 1990
School choice: Strong — nationwide per-pupil vouchers since 1981 (reformed 2015 to curb for-profit and selection)
Reform episode: 1975– 'Chicago Boys' under the Pinochet dictatorship; 1981 private pensions; 1985– pragmatic second wave
Currency: Floating

Ideas put into practice

Friedman →Hayek →

Chicago-trained economists freed prices, cut tariffs to a flat 10% and privatised pensions under a military dictatorship that killed or disappeared about 3,000 people. Chile later became Latin America's richest large economy; inequality and the 2019 protests remain part of the story.

Try: switch to Flat tax and watch the former Soviet bloc light up, then School choice (Sweden, Chile, the Netherlands), then tap Hong Kong and Singapore (the dots in East Asia). Scores are approximate; see Sources below.

Freedom vs prosperity

Each dot is a country: economic freedom across, income per head up (log scale, so each gridline is ten times richer). Hovering a dot highlights the country on the map above, and the reverse works too.

Exclude oil & gas states

Economic freedom vs GDP per capita (PPP, log scale)

EuropeN. AmericaLatin AmericaEast Asia & PacificSouth AsiaMiddle East & N. AfricaSub-Saharan AfricaEurasia

Correlation r

0.65

freedom vs log income, n = 159

Variance explained

43%

r² — the rest is everything else

Median income, freest

$62k

score ≥ 7.5 (35 countries)

Median income, least free

$7k

score < 6 (28 countries)

Slope

×2.3

income per +1 point of freedom (fitted)

Correlation is not causation. The link is strong and holds in most studies, but rich countries can afford good courts and stable money, so causation runs both ways. Geography, history, culture, colonial legacies, oil and education all matter (Gulf states are rich and only middle-ranked; the Nordics are free but high-tax). The stronger evidence comes from natural experiments below, and from the institutions literature (North, Acemoglu & Robinson) discussed in Property & institutions.

Try: tick “Exclude oil & gas states” and watch r rise; hover the far-left dots (Venezuela, Zimbabwe) and the top-right (Singapore, Switzerland).

Reform stories, before and after

Fifteen episodes where a country moved sharply toward markets, and three where it moved away. Each shows what was done, a before/after chart, which thinkers it drew on, and the caveats that come with it.

1/18

Hong Kong · 1961–1971

market reform

Positive non-interventionism

John Cowperthwaite, Financial Secretary

Before

A crowded refugee port in 1950 with no natural resources, poorer than the UK by a factor of three.

After

By 1997 income per head had passed Britain's.

What they did

No tariffs at all; free port
Low, nearly flat taxes and balanced budgets
Refused to compile detailed GDP statistics so officials wouldn't be tempted to plan
Let failing firms fail

Ideas:Adam Smith →Friedman →

GDP per capita (2011 int'l $, approx.)

Hong KongUnited Kingdom

Caveats. The government owned all land and leased it out, and built huge public housing estates. Colonial rule was not democratic, and Beijing has curtailed civil liberties since 2020.

Try: step through Chile, Estonia, Poland and Brazil (all inflation stories on a log scale), then switch to “Markets suppressed” for the mirror image. Numbers are rounded and partly stylised.

Natural experiments

The closest thing economics has to a controlled trial: one people, one culture, split by a border into two economic systems. Pick a pair and compare GDP per head over time.

North vs South Korea: GDP per capita (int'l $, approx.)

South KoreaNorth Korea

Ratio, 1950

1.4×

South Korea ÷ North Korea

Ratio, 2018

22.3×

$38k vs $2k

Same people, language and history; split by an armistice line in 1953. The North, with most of the peninsula's industry and mines, was probably ahead into the 1960s. Then the South's market economy (state-guided, and a dictatorship until 1987) pulled away; the North's plan stagnated and collapsed into famine in the 1990s. North Korean figures are outside estimates.

Mises →Hayek →Property & institutions →

Try: pick North vs South Korea and note the North was level or ahead around 1960; then Hong Kong vs China on a log scale, where parallel lines mean equal growth rates and the mainland’s line bends upward after 1978.

Sources and honesty notes

Sources. Economic-freedom scores are rounded approximations in the style of the Fraser Institute's Economic Freedom of the World (data ~2021–22), cross-checked with the Heritage Foundation Index of Economic Freedom. GDP per capita (PPP, ~2023) and tariffs come from the World Bank's World Development Indicators (IMF for Taiwan; outside estimates for Venezuela, North Korea and a few others). Historical series are rounded from the Maddison Project, IMF, World Bank and national statistics offices; some are stylised to keep the shape and scale right. Map geometry: Natural Earth (public domain) at 1:110m, Equal Earth projection, so tiny states like Hong Kong and Singapore appear as dots.

What the indices measure, and what they leave out. Freedom indices are built by free-market think tanks and weight things like low taxes and light regulation, so a high-tax but well-governed country (Denmark) can score close to a low-tax one. They measure economic freedom, not democracy: Hong Kong, Singapore and Pinochet's Chile ranked high while restricting political freedom. The question of whether political and economic liberty go together is covered in Liberty & the state, and why property rights and courts matter so much in Property & institutions.

takeawayLiberal ideas travelled: flat taxes across the former Soviet bloc, inflation targeting from New Zealand to Brazil, vouchers in Sweden and Chile, titling in Peru, Thailand and Rwanda.
takeawayFreer economies are much richer on average (r ≈ 0.65 against log income), but correlation isn't causation. The sharpest evidence comes from natural experiments like the two Koreas and the two Germanys.
takeawayThe record is mixed: reforms often worked on inflation and growth, but some came with dictatorship (Chile), insider capture (Russia) or a painful transition (Poland, Argentina). Institutions decide how much freedom pays off.