I’ve showered Switzerland with praise in recent months.

Now it’s time for more. The 2025 version of the Human Freedom Index has been released and Switzerland has the world’s highest combination of economic and personal freedom.

This is hardly a surprise. When I first started writing about the Human Freedom Index, Hong Kong was the best jurisdiction in the world. Then New Zealand regularly appeared in the top spot.

In recent years, though, Switzerland has been in first place, including in 2023 and 2024.

Here are the world’s top-20 nations, with Denmark and New Zealand winning silver and bronze and the United States at #15.

What about the world’s worst nations? Which countries combine bad economic policy and don’t respect human liberty?

Syria is the worst of the worst, followed by Iran and Yemen. Venezuela is in the bottom 10 (no surprise), and Russia and China also rank poorly.

I’m a big believer in looking at trends, so I went to the HFI database and calculated the biggest changes this century.

Nicaragua is the worst of the worst, followed by Venezuela and Egypt. It’s also very sad to see how much Hong Kong has dropped.

Meanwhile, Iraq, Liberia, and Angola have improved the most, though they started so low that they should still be viewed as unfree nations.

I’ll close with a final observation about the superiority of enlightenment values.

Notice that the world’s freest nations are in North America and Western Europe.

I should hasten to add that this has nothing to do with race. Japan and Taiwan both get very high scores, as did Hong Kong before China’s crackdown. And there are African and Latin American nations in the top 50 as well.

The point is that libertarian (or classical liberal) values are most common in western nations and it would be wonderful if those values spread throughout the world.

P.S. It also would be great if we could stop the erosion of those values in Europe and the United States.