(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2018-11)
Abbas, Aarij; Park, Gemma
The struggle to find the right balance between government intervention and the invisible hand of the market is familiar to all who have tried to form any semblance of economic policy. Due to the vast number of policy sectors that affect a country’s economic prosperity, the same approaches can have varying degrees of success in different countries. This study takes a data set collected by the Heritage Foundation that has studied the regulatory practices of 173 countries in the areas of trade, business freedom, labor freedom and other factors that are proven to have an effect on a country’s economic growth and prosperity. We hypothesize that factors such as trade policy and business regulation will have a much larger effect on a country’s economic outlook, while factors such as labor regulation will have a comparatively low impact.