This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Thursday, January 25, 2018.

I'm Gable Brown.

The New Human Freedom Index tracks economic, personal, and civil freedoms across the globe.

Report co-author Ian Vasquez says what's notable about the countries leading the rankings,

how diverse those countries are.

He argues that it shows freedom works in very

different places. Well what we've done is create a report that measures

broadly economic, personal, and civil freedoms around the world

in 159 countries.

And what we're measuring is the absence of course of constraint the idea that everybody's free

to lead their lives as long as they respect the equal rights of others and we use 79 separate indicators for 159 countries over the course of many years in order to gauge the level of global freedom and the level of freedom within those countries.

And so that's what we're measuring.

What can we say about the movements of countries thus far?

This is now the third year of producing

this index which is based in part on the economic freedom of the world index that is

led by the the Fraser Institute is there any anything that that is surprising in this report that if people have not

seen the previous ones?

Well a couple of things can be said.

One is that global freedom has been decreasing, slightly, since 2008, which is the

earliest year for which we have complete data compared to this year's report. And compared to last year's report and compared to last year's report there's also been a slight decrease.

What's happening is a lot of movement among countries in terms of increases and decreases in freedom.

So over that time period, you see about half the country is increasing their freedom,

...