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.

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 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.

Syftet med denna studie är att undersöka jämställdhetsfrågors aktualitet och betydelse i den sydafrikanska politiken. Detta görs med förhoppningen att kunna säga någonting om landets potentiella jämställdhetsutveckling, och om huruvida en sådan utveckling kan påverka den generella utvecklingen i ett land som är viktigt för regionen både ekonomiskt och inom jämställdhetsområdet. Studien undersöker därför Sydafrikas tre största partiers valmanifest inför de lokala val som hölls i augusti 2016 – ANC:s, DA:s och EFF:s - för att ta reda på hur jämställdhetsfrågor behandlas, alternativt icke behandlas. Undersökningen genomförs med hjälp av kvantitativ och kvalitativ innehållsanalys. Resultaten påvisar att valet, ur en partipolitisk synvinkel, inte genomsyrades av jämställdhet eller av en jämställdhetsinriktad diskurs. Därför är undersökningen pessimistisk till Sydafrikas vidareutveckling inom jämställdhetsområdet inom den närmaste framtiden, och därmed även till dess positiva inverkan på den generella utvecklingen i landet. Detta trots ett skiftande politiskt landskap.

In economy, banking sector has been considered as the main issue for development. Using panel data analyzing to test the relationship between banks performance and economic freedom indexes for 9 emerging market countries in Asia, the paper¡¦s result shows that there is the positive effect between monetary freedom, business freedom, financial freedom and banks performance while investment freedom has a negative impact. It suggests that emerging market countries¡¦ government and the policy maker need to focus deeply on the operation, the efficiency of regulation and improving the economic freedom.