Fraser Institute published its “Economic Freedom of the World - 2021 Annual Report” in which it uncovers economic freedom scores for the year 2019 and measures the extent to which policies and institutions in 165 countries and territories across the globe foster this freedom. In fact, Fraser Institute’s index of economic freedom pivots around five major pillars, namely: size of government, legal system and property rights, sound money, freedom to trade internationally, and regulation of credit, labor, and business. The value of the index is accordingly calculated by averaging the related scores on a scale from zero to ten. In this context, Lebanon was assigned a score of 6.76 in the 2019 index of economic freedom, compared to a score of 6.88 in the 2018 index, ranking as such 95^th in the world, down from the 83^rd place it occupied a year before. More specifically, the report showed a deterioration in 2 of Lebanon’s sub-indices, scoring 8.12 in the size of government sub-index and 5.90 in the freedom to trade internationally sub-index. Lebanon, however, showed improvement in the other three sub-indices where it scored 9.20 in the sound money sub-index, 6.50 in the regulation sub-index and 4.10 in the legal system and property rights sub-index.

When compared to its regional peers, Lebanon ranked in the sixth position in economic freedom, faring better than Kuwait (score: 6.72), Morocco (score: 6.69), and Oman (score: 6.69), among others, yet trailing Saudi Arabia (score: 6.85), Qatar (score: 7.09), the United Arab Emirates (score: 7.28), Bahrain (score: 7.33), and Jordan (7.59).