NEW DELHI: Here is an area where India leads China - economic freedom to businessmen on the choice of the business they wish to pursue. India, which improved its global ranking to 69 among 141 countries in providing economic choices on business and competition, particularly since its economic reforms of 1991, is substantially ahead of China's 86th position.

However, the ranking also marks a substantial slip for India from the 60th position, which it had reached in 2004. Among the five components of the EFW index, the largest increase for India is in "Freedom to Trade Internationally," that enabled India to improve its score to 7.0 in 2005 from 3.9 in 1990.

According to the Economic Freedom of the World (EFW) annual report 2007 that evaluates countries on the basis of the degree of freedom it provided in 2005 to choose and pursue business, India scored 6.6 points out of 10 to reach the 69th position, China was 17 ranks below with a score of 6.3 for the year.The report noted that in 1990, India was rated at 4.9 out of 10 to rank 80, in 2005 it improved to 6.6, making it one of the largest improvements in the last 15 years for any country.

As a global index, it measures the degree to which policies and institutions of these countries are supportive of economic freedom, which includes elements like personal choice, voluntary exchange, freedom to compete and security of privately owned property.

Hong Kong and Singapore, once again as in the past year, lead the 10 top ten that includes New Zealand, Switzerland, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Estonia, Ireland and Australia. Commerce minister Kamal Nath noted while releasing the report for 2007 that such studies help governments in making policy reforms and added that without justice sustainable freedom could not be achieved.