Which Economic Freedoms Contribute to Growth? A Comment
评论了Heckelman和Stroup（2000）提出的基于回归分析加总经济自由成分的方法存在严重缺陷，并采用潜变量估计技术构建替代指数，发现该指数与经济增长的关系不稳健。
Most studies on the relationship between economic freedom and growth employ a measure of economic freedom based on an (ad hoc) aggregation of various underlying components. We argue that the alternative aggregation procedure as recently suggested by Heckelman and Stroup (2000) — in which aggregation is directly based upon the relevance of each component for growth, as determined by multivariate regression analysis — is seriously flawed. We present an alternative index based on latent variable estimation techniques. Using standard robustness analyses we find that this index of economic freedom is not robustly related to economic growth.