Taiwan comes in at No. 11 in the rankings of Economic Freedom for 2017

　The Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal jointly published the 2017 Index of Economic Freedom on February 15, 2017.  According to this annual report, Taiwan takes the 11th place to achieve its best ever ranking out of the 180 economies assessed. 

　The Economic Freedom Index measures and assesses a total of 180 economies.  Rounding out this year’s top 10 countries are Hong Kong (No. 1), Singapore (No. 2), New Zealand (No. 3), Switzerland (No. 4), Australia (No. 5), Estonia (No. 6), Canada (No. 7), United Arab Emirates (No. 8), Ireland (No. 9), and Chile (No. 10). 

　The Index of Economic Freedom measures an economy based on 12 factors which consist of four broad categories each with three sub-indexes.  The four broad categories are Rule of Law (sub-indexes of property rights, government integrity, and judicial effectiveness), Size of Government (sub-indexes of government spending, tax burden, and fiscal health), Regulatory Efficiency (sub-indexes of business freedom, labor freedom, and monetary freedom), and Open Markets (sub-indexes of trade freedom, investment freedom, and financial freedom). 

　According to this report, Taiwan is categorized as “mostly free” with an overall score of 76.5 points out of 100, a gain of 1.8 points from the previous year.  Among the 12 benchmarks used by the Index, Taiwan performed particularly well in business freedom (scoring 93.4), government spending (scoring 89.5), property rights (scoring 86.5), trade freedom (scoring 86.2), monetary freedom (scoring 85.2), and fiscal health (scoring 83.7).  Moreover, Taiwan makes substantial improvement in the sub-index of property rights (attaining a score of 86.5), up 16.5 points from 2016.  (February 2017) 
/CCS