Economic freedom and development

Today, comparing with the developing and underdeveloped countries, there are very few developed counties around the world. Certainly, all countries try to make progress and get accounted among the developed countries. As a major element, economic growth seems highly essential in order to make it come true. In an unequal world, the whole countries are in truly different levels of development and consequently share the wealth discriminatingly as well. In the 1980s, the liberal economic policies were implemented and started to draw attentions. Rising from the developed countries, globalization and liberalization wave hit the developing and underdeveloped countries and encouraged the implementation of these policies. These releasing economic policies are generally referred as "economic freedom" and are recommended by international institutions, academicians and the developed countries. The main focus of the current study is to know whether the releasing policies, which are considered as the insistently recommended solutions in developing and underdeveloped countries, have an effect on these countries or not. For this reason, large theoretical framework and the basic economic statements were investigated; the empirical part of the research was studied in literature and the impact of some economic freedom indices on GDP per capita was analyzed by using the panel data method. The total countries of 62 countries as 27 developed countries, 25 developing countries and 10 underdeveloped were closely analyzed in the period of time starting 1995-2013. Based on the documented data, it was concluded that the economic freedom doesn't have as much positive effect on the development. Furthermore, it was revealed that the positive effects can specifically attributed to developed and developing countries and the underdeveloped countries share no direct advantage with GDP per capita. Keywords: Economic Freedom, GDP Per Capita, Development, Growth, Panal Data, Cross-Sectional Dependency.