The Heritage Foundation is scheduled to release its 2015 Index of Economic Freedom today. Here’s what John Hood had to say about last year’s report.

Hundreds of millions of people live in countries in Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia that have liberalized their economies over the past 20 years. That’s one reason why global poverty has experienced one of the largest declines in human history during the period.

Not every country has gotten freer, of course. Some countries such as North Korea and Iran have remained repressed during the entire period. Others that previously had high or improving scores on the index are now experiencing backslides. The bad news is that the United States is one of them. Once a reliable leader of the pack, we have now fallen out of the top 10 countries in economic freedom, thanks to fiscal recklessness, recent increases in tax and regulatory burdens, and other encroachments on free enterprise.

While Washington (maybe) gets its act together, state and local governments will have to take the lead in helping to reverse the trend. As it happens, there are economic freedom indexes for states as well as for countries. North Carolina ranks in the middle of the pack according to some of the indexes, and a bit better than that on others. Recent decisions in Raleigh to reform and reduce taxes while reining in counterproductive regulation will help. In the coming years, lawmakers need to protect these gains in economic freedom and build on them.

Stay tuned for information about the John Locke Foundation’s new First in Freedom Index, which will help N.C. policymakers keep track of the state’s freedom in economic/fiscal, education, regulatory, and health care policies. JLF unveils FFI Feb. 7.