The purpose of this thesis is to contribute to the empirical research on how institutions of economic freedom affect country levels of entrepreneurship. Whilst the concept of economic freedom has been much applied in other areas of macroeconomics research, there are only a few studies of its effect on entrepreneurship. By analyzing 2011 data on a country sample of 48 countries representing various regions and stages of economic development, this thesis complement previous research with a larger and more recent country sample. Similarly to previous studies, self-employment data is used to obtain a proxy measure of entrepreneurship. However, in this thesis an attempt is made to elaborate this measure, and it is taken into account whether the choice of self-employment was based on opportunity or necessity. The results of a set of Ordinary Least-Square regressions do not support the hypotheses of a positive relationship between sub-components of economic freedom and entrepreneurship. Neither is the composite measure of economic freedom found to be statistically significant as a determinant of entrepreneurship. These results are contradictory to previous studies on this topic as well as the theoretical foundation of economic freedom.

Article 82 is traditionally analysed as a tool to integrate and liberalise the European Single Market and to protect competition from distortion. As such there is no comprehensive discussion of the tensions that lie at the centre of the objective of protecting competition in the current rethinking of Article 82. With regard to exclusionary abuses, DG Competition has articulated that the main objective of Article 82 is the protection of competition in the market as a means of enhancing consumer welfare and of ensuring an efficient allocation of resources. This statement may conflict with some of the case law protecting the economic freedom of the market players derived from ordoliberalism. The latter is a well respected German legal tradition that holds both that government needs to be restrained from abuse of power, and that the free market has its limits. Economic rights deserve protection and vigilance is needed to ensure economic power is not misused or abused, not only in the interests of consumer welfare, but also in the interests of the economic liberty of the individual. This thesis considers the tension between the goals of protecting economic freedom and the promotion of consumer welfare in the application of Article 82. Presupposing that economic freedom and consumer welfare are in opposition to one another, such tension is only set to intensify and must be given appropriate weight in considering the extent to which DG Competition can or should try to move to a consumer welfare standard. Changing the interpretation of protection of competition from economic freedom to consumer welfare within Article 82 can undermine a fundamental right if economic freedom is considered a fundamental right in the Community legal order. However, consumer welfare can also be seen as an opportunity, if properly debated or agreed to by the ECJ, to adopt a more economics-based approach to Article 82.

TITLE: The Impact of Institutions on Economic Growth.MAJOR PROFESSOR: Dr. Wanki Moon. Based on the cross-sectional data, my thesis examined the relationship between the Economic Freedom Indices and per capita GDP. This thesis demonstrates that the rule of law category, which includes the property right variable, is the category that most affects per capita GDP which demonstrates the importance of the institution. Data from 184 countries published by Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal were used. I analyzed the data using the OLS regression model to explore the relationship between Economic Freedom index and per capita GDP. The first model I analyzed is simple regression which regress economic freedom indices on per capita GDP. The result of the regression showed that all variables are significant, except the Tax Burden and Fiscal Health variables which were insignificant. The Government Spending and Tax Burden are the only variables have a negative effect on per capita GDP. The second model I analyzed was multiple regression for each category’s components, then I repeated the model four times, since there are four different categories with three components each. It is important to analyze each category by itself to explore what the relationship is between the component in each category and per capita GDP. The results of regression on each category including the three different components show that government integrity (from the rule of law category), government spending and fiscal health (from government size category), business freedom (from regulatory efficiency category), trade freedom and financial freedom (from open market category) are significant variables and affected per capita GDP positively except for government spending which has a negative effect on per capita GDP. On the other hand, the variables which are insignificant like property right from the rule of law category, monetary freedom from regulatory efficiency category have a positive effect on per capita GDP. But the Judicial Efficiency from the rule of law category, tax burden from government size, labor freedom from regulatory efficiency category and investment freedom from open markets are insignificant and have a negative effect on per capita GDP. However, when we look to the category as a group, we find that all four grouped index freedom is significant at 99% significant level. R-square is highest for rule of law category (68%) and very low for government size (16.7%). The third model I used includes four categories by computing the average of each category’s components, we found, by looking at R-square, that 65.4% of per capita GDP is explained by these four categories. Surprisingly, I found that the rule of law category is the only significant variable with positive effect on GDP per capita. On the other hand, Government Size, and Regulatory Efficiency are insignificant variables and have a negative effect on per capita GDP. Open Market category is insignificant variable and has a positive effect on per capita GDP.

The economic prosperity of a nation is a complex function of many factors, including its culture, geography, history, legal origins, ethnolinguistic fractionalization, resource endowment, leadership and religious homogeneity. However, economic prosperity is most robustly related to the quality of a nation’s institutions under which its resources are put to productive use. Institutions are the humanly devised constraints that structure political, economic and social interactions. Fundamental economic institutions, like property rights and the rule of law, structure the incentives that affect a nation’s productivity. Since at least the early 1990’s, economists have quantified economic institutions and policies by aggregating economic policy variables into economic indexes. Of these indexes, the most popular is the Economic Freedom of the World, which measures the consistency of a nation’s institutions with the principles of economic freedom. After decades of study, we know that economic freedom is positively related to income, gender equality, civil liberty and happiness among other desirable economic outcomes. Despite the benefits of simplifying institutions into a single number, the implicit assumptions required to do so are costly. By summarizing institutional quality as a single quantity, scholars assume that the underlying institutional structure of two economies are identical as long as their summary scores are identical. This assumption is often false, and this research examines the costs of this assumption for modeling economic growth. The common methodology for measuring institutional quality ignores both institutional volatility and institutional imbalance. This research shows that both measures are robustly and negatively related to economic growth rates. Therefore, models that simply a nation’s institutions to a single value at a single period of time are assuming away valuable information that helps explain a nation’s prosperity or lack thereof. In addition to examining the costs of these false assumptions, this research also examines the institutional trends among U.S. states since 1981. Despite declining economic freedom in the United States relative to other nations, state and local governments in the United States are liberalizing in recent decades. This phenomena is driven by increasing labor market freedom among states.

This thesis presents the comparison of role played by economic freedom and education in making population growth beneficial for economy. In order to assess this relationship, four groups of countries have been selected based on EFW index. Cross-section regression has been performed including 92 countries for years 2005 and 2010. Comparisons have also been presented in graphical analysis. Moreover, correlations among variables have also been studied. It has been concluded that education matters the most in turning population growth to an asset.

This paper analyzes the effects that state-level economic variables have on corporate success measures such as accounting-based return ratios in the period after firms initially go public.

This paper hopes to serve as a primer, firstly for this Author, regarding the concept of Institutional Economics; a foundation and an enabling environment, which allows economics to function and to be free. Firstly, we focus on the topic of institutions within the scope of economic development, and ask the simple question, “Why some countries are poor, and why some countries are rich?” In terms of set up, this paper is guided by Dani Rodrik & Arvind Subramanian’s 2003 article, “The Primacy of Institutions (and what this does and does not mean).” I looked at how institutions, market openness and geography effect economic development. Both an OLS and pooled OLS model are employed, with the results showing that, institutions account for the largest variation in income. The data is sourced from the Heritage Foundation, 2019 Index of Economic Freedom. Secondly, a discussion of Brunei Darussalam, my home country is presented, trying to link ideas of institutional economics, economic freedom, entrepreneurship and economic development.

The association between economic freedom and economic growth has been largely explored by researchers and the overall ndings indicate a signi cant and positive relationship. The empirical literature, however, is subject to suer from bias. In this paper we collect 16,070 estimates from 69 studies and using recently developed meta-analytic techniques investigate the eect of publication and speci cation biases on the reported results. While our baseline analysis re- ports some evidence for publication bias, but not very strong and robust, and con rms the speci cation bias reported by previous reviews, we also nd that these results are aected by the inclusion of three in uential outliers in the data set. Once we trim these studies, there is no evidence of speci cation bias anymore and we nd evidence of a robust and strong publication bias. Further, after controlling for the bias, we nd that the true eect of economic freedom on growth is substantially smaller than the eect reported by the empirical literature. JEL Classi cation O43; P10; P12; C52 Keywords 'economic freedom', 'economic growth', 'publi- cation bias', 'speci cation bias', 'meta-analysis' Title Economic freedom and economic growth: A Meta-Analysis

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Research concerning ‘basic needs' in the Human Rights literature has consistently found a positive and significant relationship between measures of wealth and basic needs provision. This study utilizes a relatively new measure of economic freedom to test hypotheses regarding general macro-economic policy decisions and basic needs outcomes. A pooled dataset of 138 countries over four years is examined using OLS panel regression controlling for both' year' and ‘country,' in a standard basic needs model. Consistent and systematic differences between economic freedom effects in OECD nations and non-OECD nations are revealed. The Economic Freedom Index has both theoretical and empirical advantages over previous measures of wealth and economic freedom, allowing human rights scholars to test specific economic policy decisions as they affect basic needs outcomes.