This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, June 9, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Crafting a broad measure of economic freedom is hard enough, but coming up with an estimate

of the effective functioning of the rule of law

seems an even more difficult task.

One Carlos Botero is executive director of the World Justice Project which has just produced

its Rule of Law Index, we spoke last week.

Thank you.

Well, in the context of this 800 year anniversary of the

university, the question that underlies this work is,

what does the rule of law mean to the ordinary citizen

walking the streets of Seattle, Mexico or Accra.

And to answer that question, what we have done

is we have conducted household surveys, 200,000 of them so far, in 300 cities around the world,

plus expert surveys, over 5,000 experts in 102 countries, askingking questions of the daily-day life

interaction with authorities, for instance,

did you experience situation in the police

abuse in the last year?

Someone in your household had to be a bribe to get a kid to school.

Did you have a dispute with your neighbors? How did you solve it? And the answers of all

this is a massive data set aggregate into what became the rule of law index, which is a measurement of

adherence and an estimate of adherence to the rule of law, you know, 102 countries around the world.

...