Heritage Foundation: Belarus has repressed economy

Belarus is ranked the 154th among 177 world countries in the Index of Economic Freedom.

The Index was released by the Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal.

Belarus's score is 48 out of 100 points. The country's score dropped due to a significant decline in economic freedom. Belarus is ranked the second last among the countries of the Europe region, the website Heritage Foundation informs.

Belarus's economy was classified as “repressed” due to pervasive state controls in many economic areas, poor protection of property rights, corruption, closed market and dictatorial governance.

The Heritage Foundation experts define economic freedom as “an absolute right of property ownership, fully realized freedoms of movement for labour, capital, and goods, and an absolute absence of coercion or constraint of economic liberty beyond the extent necessary for citizens to protect and maintain liberty itself”. The Foundation has been analysing economic freedom of world countries since 1995. Country's economic freedom score is a simple average of its scores on the 10 individual freedoms: business freedom, trade freedom, monetary freedom, government spending, property rights, freedom from corruption, fiscal freedom, labour freedom, investment freedom, and financial freedom. The “absolute free” economy will have 100 points, while 0 points means the absence of freedom. All countries of the world are classified as “free”, “mostly free”, “moderately free”, “mostly unfree” or “repressed”.