Colby Cosh: Hong Kong’s still king in economic freedom rankings … for now

The Fraser Institute issued its annual Economic Freedom of the World report last week. It didn’t get much attention; it never does these days. Considered as a league table, the report is very boring and static, and makes poor copy.

Ah, yes, Hong Kong. The Special Administrative Region seems, for now, to have won a short-term victory in its struggle to preserve the conditions of its reunion with mainland China. This has not, ostensively, been a struggle over economic freedom per se, but it is not a coincidence that the rioting ultimately originated in a conflict over bookstores.

Even if Hong Kong’s immediate quarrel with China has been resolved for now, it is only a manifestation of what is likely to be a longer game. Clever columnists always like exoticizing talk about how the Chinese think in generations, but when it comes to Hong Kong, the cliché has weight. The 2019 riots, in showing how attached young HKers are to their distinct identity and to the English-speaking world, have revealed a nightmarish, even delegitimizing failure by the Chinese Communists.

The economic freedom report is one of the most useful and highly regarded things that the Fraser Institute does. On one level it is ludicrous to try to quantify economic freedom, and doubly ludicrous to spit out a single summary number for every country. The design of the instrument does reflect subjective choices , but the underlying data are all in some sense objective, even when they depend on long-term surveys and measurements of economic sentiment.

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