Scandinavia regulates business less than anywhere else on earth

Browsing through the Fraser Institute 2007 Economic Freedom of the World Report,

http://www.freetheworld.com/release.html

I discovered that the nations that regulate business the least in the world are Scandinavian:

1.  Finland
2.  Iceland
3.  New Zealand
4.  Denmark
5.  Singapore
6.  Sweden
7.  Norway
8.  Hong Kong
9.  Canada
10.   Australia

The U.S. is 16th.  These rankings are based on objective third party data.  The seventeen nations that regulate business the most:

120 Niger
121 Lesotho
122 Madagascar
123 Egypt
124 Mali
125 Haiti
126 Nigeria
127 Chad
128 Central Afr. Rep.
129 Mauritania
130 China
131 Zimbabwe
132 Congo, Rep. of
133 Cameroon
134 Venezuela
135 Congo, Dem. R.
136 Angola

One of the authors of the report acknowledged that their methodology does not work for China, because in China's free zones they are among the most free countries on earth (similar to Hong Kong) but that the rest of the country remains unfree.  Other than China, Haiti (the poorest nation in the western hemisphere), and Venezuela (rapidly being destroyed by Chavez), the nations that regulate business the most are all African and all very poor (Cuba and North Vietnam are not ranked, but would be even lower).

The amount of business regulation is one component of economic freedom.  Economic freedom is closely correlated with per capita income.  The wealthiest nations have the most economic freedom, the poorest nations have the least economic freedom.  If we want to eliminate poverty, we need to increase the amount of economic freedom in poor nations around the world. 

More than twenty years ago the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto discovered that it takes more than a year to open up a business legally throughout the developing world.  As a consequence, poor people cannot open up legal businesses, and most of the economy in poor nations is on the black market or gray market.  While there are other elements to the economic freedom index that are crucial to eliminating poverty, eliminating excessive regulation is necessarily a top priority.

We need a global movement to liberate the entrepreneurial spirit for good that reduces business regulation around the world down to the Scandinavian level, and thereby eliminate global poverty.