This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, September 19th, 2016.

I'm Caleb Brown.

This year's Economic Freedom of the World Index details the strong relationships between economic freedom and the institutions

it fosters and higher standards of living.

Ian Vasquez, director of the Cato Institute's Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity,

discusses the latest findings.

The economic freedom is strongly related to prosperity and to growth.

And we now have several decades of empirical data showing that the more economically free a country

is the better its performance, not just on economic indicators, but on the whole range

of human development indicators and

indicators of human well-being.

From infant mortality to access to clean water,

to life expectancy, the numbers are really startling.

Countries that are in the most free quartile of this ranking have incomes that are around $40,000 per capita.

If you go to the next free quartile, the average incomes are about half as much, so that even what are apparently

small differences in levels of economic freedom make big differences in outcomes.

People would like to say, oh well you're talking about rich countries, so of course

they can afford to have economic freedom.

There have now been dozens and dozens of academic studies looking into the relationship

between economic freedom and outcomes like growth and prosperity and

almost without exception they show that the causation goes from economic freedom and the policies and institutions of economic freedom to those outcomes.

Which countries have improved the most?

...