Evaluating the economic freedom of countries: An application of grey factor analysis

Economic freedom is crucial in determining policies for economic performance of nations and monitoring changes in the international economic order. Evaluating economic freedom requires the use of multiple indicators related to each other. Traditional statistical analyses used as an evaluation tool are often constrained by the probability distribution of indicators or sample size. To overcome these shortcomings, this paper uses grey factor analysis (GFA) to evaluate the economic freedom of countries. GFA can be used with multiple interrelated indicators without requirements about the probability distributions or sample size. The absolute degree of grey incidence matrix is used instead of the correlation matrix in factor analysis and GFA integrates the advantages of grey system theory into factor analysis. The analysis covers data for 2010 and 2020 about 20 economic freedom indicators in 36 selected countries. Two factors explain a significant part of the variance for both years. The scores for countries were obtained using the explained variance ratio as a weight. Our results show that GFA provides more accurate results than traditional statistical analyses.