Fraser Institute published its “Economic Freedom of the World - 2022 Annual Report” in which it uncovers economic freedom scores for the year 2020 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 5.45 in the 2020 index of economic freedom, compared to a score of 6.76 in the 2019 index, ranking as such 154^th in the world, down from the 95^th place it occupied a year before. More specifically, the report showed a deterioration in 3 of Lebanon’s sub-indices, scoring 5.00 in the sound money sub-index, 3.50 in the freedom to trade internationally sub-index and 6.40 in the regulation sub-index. Lebanon, however, showed improvement in the size of Government sub-index with a score of 8.22 while the legal system and property rights sub-index remained flat at 4.10.

When compared to its regional peers, Lebanon ranked in the thirteenth position in economic freedom, faring better than Algeria (score: 5.12), Libya (score: 4.95), Syria (score: 4.63) and Sudan (score: 4.21).