Abstract:

 Economic freedom means the ability and rights of people of a country to take any economic actions. The concept of economic freedom is a key term during many political debates and in the philosophy of economics (see for example Bronfenbrenner 1955). To measure economic freedom whole number of indicators (quantitative and qualitative from four main categories)  are taken into account. These indicators are then combined to build an economic freedom index. The main aim of the paper is to present the results of symbolic ensemble clustering and ensemble linear ordering of selected European countries according to their economic freedom. In the empirical part of the paper results of linear ordering and symbolic clustering ensemble are presented (where different clustering results are combined using Leisch’s approach). Besides that linear ordering multidimensional scaling for symbolic data (with symbolic-numeric approach) is used to visualize results. Both approaches allow discovering countries that share similar patterns of economic freedom.