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New Pedagogical Study by Mixon Develops Classroom Activity Highlighting the Importance of Economic Freedom

A new pedagogical study by Turner College economist Frank Mixon and his co-author Rand Ressler of Georgia Southern University describes a straightforward classroom exercise that highlights the general tradeoff between the level of economic freedom and economic performance using the Index of Economic Freedom that is published annually by the Heritage Foundation.  Countries are categorized using the Index of Economic Freedom as being “free,” “mostly free,” “moderately free,” “mostly unfree,” and “repressed.”  The classroom exercise focuses on the relationship between economic freedom and economic performance (measures of a population’s well-being) and is amenable to either group or individual effort by way of a brief writing project or oral presentation.  The first step is to assign, or let students select, 10 countries, with at least one country in each of the five Index of Economic Freedom categories listed above.  For each selected country, students should record the Index of Economic Freedom and ranking.  Next, students are tasked with collecting real GDP per capita for each of the 10 countries.  At this point, the instructor can ask students to describe, either in a brief paper or oral presentation, any correlation they notice between economic freedom and real GDP per capita.  Typically, students will notice a positive relationship between the degree of economic freedom and real GDP per capita.  An additional step can be integrated into the paper or presentation.  For this, the instructor can follow up with a regression or correlation matrix using the data collected by the students in the class.  These statistics can be presented to the class.  The classroom exercise, which is explained in greater detail by Mixon and Ressler in a 2023 issue of Advances in Economics Education, is tailored to both principles of economics students and those in various upper-level economics courses (e.g., comparative economic systems).

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