Economic Freedom Index: Morocco First in North Africa

Rabat – American think tank the Heritage Foundation released their annual Economic Freedom Index, placing Morocco 97th in the world, with a score of 59.2, dropping 4 points from last year.

The ranking positions Morocco as first in North Africa, the only country in the region to crack the top 100.

The index is measured based on 12 quantitative and qualitative factors that are divided into four main categories.

The first category, rule of law, includes property rights, government integrity, and judicial effectiveness. The second, government size, includes government spending, tax burden, in addition to fiscal health.

Regulator efficiency is the third pillar of the index, encompassing business, labor, and monetary freedom.

The last category is open markets, which includes freedoms of trade and investment, as well as general financial freedoms.

Each of the 12 factors is graded on a scale of 1 to 100, before the overall score for the countries is calculated by averaging the scores.

The factors are weighted equally, with the foundation saying that every component is equally important to the economic freedom of the countries.

Morocco’s government integrity and labor freedom saw an improvement this year, but the remaining factors either stagnated or fell.

The foundation notes that the overall score of the country is above the regional average, and that the past five years have been a period of slow growth for the economy.

At the top of the index, Singapore, Switzerland, and Ireland occupied the top three sports, with scores in the 80s.

Other North African countries lagged behind Morocco; Mauritania came in 119th with a score of 55.3, Tunisia was 128th with 54.2, and Egypt fell into the “repressed” category with a score of 49.1, occupying the 152nd place.

Notably, Algeria was ranked among the worst worldwide in the index, scoring 45.8 and coming in at 167th.

At the very bottom of the ranking was Cuba and Venezuela, with 29.5 and 24.8 respectively, while North Korea unsurprisingly occupied the very last place with a score of 3.0.

A few countries were not ranked, these included Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria among others.