The Mercatus Center just released the first-ever comprehensive ranking of American states and how their public policies affect economic, social and personal freedom. This study improves on prior attempts to score economic freedom for American states by including measures of social and personal freedoms; more variables as well as new more accurate measurements of key variables, particularly state fiscal policies. The results of this study showed that the freest states in the country are New Hampshire, Colorado and South Dakota. All three states feature low taxes and government spending and middling levels of regulation and paternalism. As for freedom in the different regions of the country, the Mountain and West North Central regions proved to be the freest overall, while the Middle Atlantic lags far behind on both economic and personal freedoms. The data used to develop the rankings are available here.
The Mercatus Center received a Templeton Award from Atlas in 2008 in the category of Special Achievement by a University-based Center.
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