The latest issue of Economic Freedom of the World, written by James Gwartney, Robert Lawson, and Joshua Hall, was released this week. You can find the whole thing here. The United States has slipped from #6 last year to #10 this year. Canada replaces the United States as #6, moving up from #7 last year. Hong Kong is still #1.

Note that all the data are from 2009.

On this blog post, one of the authors, Robert Lawson, highlights the areas of U.S. economic freedom where the decline was greatest. Someone asked me at the end of a talk a year ago where I expected the United States to be in a year or two. At the time, the U.S. was #6. Because I knew the data for the 2011 report would be from 2009, I was pessimistic. I said the U.S. would likely be lower, somewhere between #8 and #10. In other words, the U.S. achieved the bottom end of my pessimistic prediction.