In December 2017 Libek conducted a metastudy of academic publications dealing with the correlation between economic freedom and economic growth. In past, several metastudies have been done around the world, demonstrating that there indeed was a correlation. The new study done by Libek takes in consideration a broader amount of academic studies.



The Libek study covers a broader time period (from 1994 to 2016), a broader scope of definitions of economic freedom (not only economic freedom as defined by the Fraser Institute Economic Freedom of the World Index, but also definitions from other sources, such as the Heritage Foundation), and provides a more narrow focus, by analyzing only the connection between economic freedom and economic growth.

By using Google Scholar, the research identified 2428 academic studies covering the topic of economic freedom. From this number, only 4% cover the correlation between economic freedom and economic growth.

From those studies, 93.5% found a positive correlation between economic freedom and economic growth.

This presents a relatively high level of agreement among economists that economic freedom is positively correlated with economic growth.

For a country like Serbia, which has a relatively low level of economic freedom compared to most European countries and one of the lowest economic freedom levels in the Balkans region, this could show the way towards faster economic growth, leading to more economic prosperity.

The complete metastudy is available here.