Per-capita wealth and poverty in a given political economy is strongly correlated both with economic freedom and oppression and with the perception of integrity or corruption among government officials.

Countries that pursue policies of economic freedom have rich populations. Countries that obstruct free enterprise have poor populations. The relative wealth or poverty of a given population is strongly correlated with and can be readily predicted from the level of economic oppression in that political economy. This is easily understood from Austrian and Classical economic theory, but it’s stunning to see how relentlessly the theory is borne out in the real-life experiences of the countries of the earth:

This map is from The Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom.

Interestingly, relative wealth and poverty are also very fairly correlated with perceptions of the local population of the integrity or corruption of government officials.

This map is from Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index.

What’s especially striking is to look at the two maps together: Government corruption is correlated with economic oppression. This is not really surprising, but it seems to tell us everything we need to know about wealth and poverty: The closer a given country is to being a slave-state, the closer to starvation the people of that country will be.

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