The Evolution of US State Economic Freedom during the Pandemic’s Second Year

This article updates a measure of lockdown regulatory freedom for 2021 and adjusts the economic freedom scores of US states—as measured in the Economic Freedom of North America index—to account for how lockdown regulations affected economic freedom. We also use the measure to assess how overall economic freedom evolved from the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic through 2021. When scores are not adjusted for lockdown regulations, average economic freedom across the fifty states appears essentially unchanged from 2019 through 2021. In contrast, our lockdown-adjusted freedom scores reveal that average economic freedom plunged in 2020 and while freedom increased in 2021, the increase was insufficient to offset the substantial decline experienced in 2020.

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