Welcome back to Fraser Insight, the Fraser Institute’s U.S. newsletter. This autumn issue of Insight highlights research and programming focused on economic freedom.

The In Focus section, which always showcases in-depth research and analysis, features the latest Economic Freedom of the World Annual Report, where—for the first time ever—Hong Kong is not ranked number one. Singapore grabs the top spot. The U.S. ranks fifth, up from seventh in the 2022 report. The In Focus section also includes reports covering climate change, monetary policy and socialism.

The In Print section, which includes timely commentaries and op-eds, features essays showcasing the creative efforts and outputs of our EFNA Network, along with articles on the minimum wage, education reform, energy supply and climate science.

Finally, our In Context section recaps the annual gathering of our EFNA Network, which convened in Dallas last month, and provides news about the Essential Scholars podcast series.

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The Fraser Institute’s EFNA Network now enfolds 60 members in 47 U.S. states and territories, Canada, and Mexico. In the past 12 months, Network members have generated 155 media placements in dozens of major statewide and national outlets.

The pact publicly committed Nazi Germany and the USSR to non-aggression. But it was the secret protocols of the pact—denied by the Soviet Union for 50 years—which reshaped the world.

Thirty-one percent of Americans believe socialism is the ideal economic system. In many ways, the poll responses, particularly from younger people, mirror the arguments made by self-described “social democrats” who argue the U.S. should be more like Sweden. But there’s one problem: Americans are highly unlikely to accept Sweden’s level of taxation.

Adding to the already voluminous literature showing the harmful effects of minimum wages—specifically, its negative effects on employment, concentrated among the least-skilled and least-advantaged workers—are a trio of recent studies.

We need excellent teachers, whether they have a Bachelor of Education degree or not. Let’s focus on what works best for students, not on protecting the jobs of education professors.

Once again, we’re being told the weather patterns we normally associate with summer are signs of climate doom.

Many politicians have signed pledges to leave fossil fuels in the ground and to ban plastics. Almost never discussed in this context, however, is why coal, petroleum, natural gas, plastic and composite materials were developed in the first place. The economic and environmental benefits of these things are either ignored or simply taken for granted.

Four-fifths of global energy demand is still met by a combination of coal, oil and natural gas.

In both Canada and the United States, the federal government spent a massive amount of money during COVID. A significant portion of this money was mismanaged, poorly targeted, wasteful or simply excessive. Taxpayers in both countries will bear the cost of this fiscal waste for years to come.

For the first time in the history of the report, Hong Kong is not ranked number one. New regulatory barriers to entry, limits on employment of foreign labor, and increases in the cost of business drove a decline in its regulatory freedom component. Increased military interference in the rule of law and eroding confidence in judicial independence led to a decline in Hong Kong’s legal system and property rights measures. The top spot is now occupied by Singapore, followed by Hong Kong, Switzerland, New Zealand, the United States, Ireland, Denmark, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Canada. The expectation is that Hong Kong’s score will continue to fall as the Chinese Communist Party continues to suppress economic and political freedom.

Much of what the outside world thinks it knows about the Swedish model is wrong. Sweden had been an open capitalist economy between 1870 and 1970, but then moved in a decid¬edly socialist direction by increasing the size of government, regulations, and taxes. The result was a 20-year period that hurt the economy’s competitiveness, lowered living standards, and ended in the terrible financial crash of the early 1990s. Then came a sharp retreat from socialist policies, and the country implemented reforms that once again moved Sweden back to a broadly successful, capitalist-inclined economy.

The policy implications of the mismatch between model-based and measurement-based estimates of climate warming are fairly obvious. When compared with measurement-based estimates of climate sensitivity, model-based estimates appear to be running “too hot” and, as a consequence, policies to mitigate such changes are themselves likely running “too hot” and overly aggressive. Measurement-based estimates suggest an atmosphere less sensitive to greenhouse-gas enrichment. This would, in turn, suggest that less-aggressive efforts to mitigate greenhouse-gas emissions, perhaps also with longer time-horizons might suffice to protect the world from possible climate change.

This paper describes the era of unconventional monetary policies (UMP) and its principal motivations and tenets. The principal instruments of UMP are quantitative easing (QE), which encompasses central bank purchases of government-issued bonds, and private sector debt, such as mortgages, as well as forward guidance. The latter encompasses the public statements made by central bank officials that signal the likely direction of future monetary policy.

A significant challenge when mandating uniform environmental-social-governance (ESG) disclosure regulations and applying them to all public companies is related to implementation difficulties. In particular, identifying ESG materiality (i.e., defining what specific ESG issues are topics for reporting) will inevitably be arbitrary and unsatisfactory to many “stakeholders.” ESG encompasses a broad set of issues including waste and water management, supply-chain management, hiring and compensation, and climate change. Stakeholders’ interests in ESG differ. Hence, so do their views of what is of material interest for corporate disclosure.

EFNA Network partners took center stage at our annual EFNA Network Conference, which was hosted by SMU’s Bridwell Institute for Economic Freedom in Dallas. The conference brought together partner institutions from Hawaii, Texas, Puerto Rico, Arkansas, Ohio, New Hampshire, Michigan, Virginia, Minnesota, California, Alabama, Canada and Mexico. The program featured sessions covering: innovative ways Network members are using the report in research and outreach; the emergence of what’s been called “freedom conservatism”; strategies employed to promote economic freedom in circles of influence; women and economic freedom; the impact of economic freedom at the metro level; ways EFNA data can be leveraged in research; and EFNA 2023, which will be released next month. Find out more about the EFNA Network here. If you are interested in your organization joining the EFNA Network, contact Alan Dowd (managing director of the Network) at [email protected].

Stack up your playlist with a number of new podcasts from our Essential Scholars series, including discussions on Ronald Coase, David Hume and the Austrian School of Economics.