ABSTRACT
The empirical literature on economic freedom has introduced many conclusive results analyzing the positive impact of free economic actors and free markets on the economic state of a country. Empirical studies shed light on the connection between economic freedom and other variables such as economic conditions, political states, and social aspects (Weede 2006; Gwartney and Lawson 2007). Instead of applying econometric methods, in the present chapter we demonstrate the empirical connection between economic freedom and other macro-level variables by means of correspondence analysis (CA) (cf. Greenacre 1984, 2007). The method belongs to the set of techniques that are summarized under the rubric “geometric data analysis” (LeRoux andRouanet 2004), or, in French, “Analyse des Données” (Benzécri et al. 1973). Themain object of CA is to visualize the rows and columns of any data table with non-negative entries within an r-dimensional map. Although themethod has usually been used to analyze categorical data, CAcan also be applied to analyze metric, ordinal, or rank data (Greenacre 2007). Applications of CA are given in very different fields of the social sciences and outside of them (compare the readers from Greenacre and Blasius 1994, 2006; Blasius and Greenacre 1998). Although it is possible to describe higher-dimensional spaces, most applications are restricted to two-dimensions.
