Third in freedom, last-equal in Cinnabon

New Zealand again ranks third in the 2013 Economic Freedom report, after having caught first place in a more comprehensive index of human freedom (both personal liberties and economic freedoms) earlier this year. Here's the Fraser Institute's latest report. New Zealand's been third in the Economic Freedom rankings since 2004 and in the top 5 since 1995.

But there are a few different conceptions of freedom.

The Economic Freedom index captures an important one: the freedom to engage in economic transactions without coercion, secure in the knowledge that your property rights will be enforced, that money is sound, and that taxation's burden doesn't weigh too heavily. This measure of freedom tends to be a pretty strong predictor of economic well-being. If the regressions that my honours student is working up are right, people mostly value economic freedom instrumentally: they migrate from one country to another based on the differences in income that economic freedom generates rather than because of economic freedom per se. Personal freedoms seem to be driving rather a lot. But I'll post on that work when we're a little farther along.

But another important freedom is the freedom to purchase a Cinnabon. And while I am not banned from here buying one, there exists not a single Cinnabon anywhere in Australia or New Zealand. I expect that somebody's bought the franchise rights and hasn't bothered doing anything with them. Here's an alternative freedom ranking, based on the number of Cinnabons in a country. I haven't weighted by population yet: that is left as an exercise for some future student. Ideally, you'd want a measure of the time cost for the average trip to a Cinnabon. For New Zealand, you'd need to fly to the Phillipines or to Los Angeles. If you lived in Ramallah, in the Palestinian Territory, you might be able to just walk next door.

Here is the Cinnabon Freedom Index (crude). I hope someone improves upon it. We simply here have the number of outlets per country, as listed on their website today. I wonder whether some of the numbers are out of date: their website stopped adding news stories back in December 2012. But here are the numbers.

Country	Rank	Number of Outlets	Econ Freedom Rank
United States	1	531	17
Saudi Arabia	2	144	60
Russia	3	56	101
United Arab Emirates	4	36	5
Egypt	4	36	108
Venezuela	6	31	152
Mexico	7	23	94
Canada	7	23	8
Philippines	9	22	56
Kuwait	10	19	55
South Africa	11	18	88
Panama	12	14	67
Ecuador	13	12	134
Honduras	14	11	56
Bahrain	14	11	8
Colombia	14	11	96
Japan	17	9	33
Puerto Rico	18	7
Malaysia	18	7	68
Costa Rica	18	7	63
Romania	21	6	45
Aruba	21	6
United Kingdom	23	5	12
Guatemala	23	5	56
Dominican Republic	23	5	61
Qatar	26	4	23
El Salvador	26	4	73
India	26	4	111
Jordan	26	4	13
South Korea	30	3	33
Thailand	30	3	94
Trinidad	30	3	79
Oman	30	3	46
Austria	30	3	27
Cyprus	30	3	18
Peru	36	2	22
Greece	36	2	85
Kyrgyzstan	36	2	102
Lebanon	36	2	38
Malta	36	2	21
Palestinian Territory	41	1
Poland	41	1	59
Syria	41	1
Turkey	41	1	68
Germany	41	1	19
Guam	41	1
Italy	41	1	83
Latvia	41	1	46
Nicaragua	41	1	54
Azerbaijan	41	1	117
Chile	41	1	11
Curacao	41	1

See New Zealand or Australia on that list? No. We're last equal at zero. Tied with Antarctica. And Greenland. And Iran.

I wonder whether adding per capita Cinnabon density to any of Chris's migration regressions would improve fit.

It's four years ago that Prime Minister John Key appeared on the David Letterman show announcing that New Zealand now had a Cinnabon in the Auckland Airport. It wasn't true then and it isn't true now. I blame Letterman's writers. But I'm still disappointed.