Accepting the view that beliefs about the market determine the policies and institutions of economic freedom, this paper considers the cross-country consequences of the fact that these beliefs are not one-dimensional and they may be inconsistently distributed over these dimensions. The paper asks the question of whether cross-country differences in the consistency of market beliefs help explain the cross-country differences in areas of economic freedom, especially the contrasting cross-country pattern of the size of government and the legal system and property rights area. It shows that under some plausible conditions in a probabilistic voting framework, a higher consistency leads to higher economic freedom in some areas and lower economic freedom in other areas. Therefore, the concept of the consistency of market beliefs helps us understand why countries with higher economic freedom score for legal system and property rights usually have a lower economic freedom score for the size of government. Using Cronbach’s (coefficient) alpha of four different market beliefs as a measure of consistency in cross-country regressions, the paper finds that consistency is an explanatory factor of the two economic freedom areas.

中文翻译：

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市场信念的一致性作为经济自由的决定因素

接受关于市场的信念决定经济自由的政策和制度的观点，本文考虑了这些信念不是一维的并且它们可能在这些维度上不一致地分布这一事实的跨国后果。本文提出的问题是，市场信念一致性的跨国差异是否有助于解释经济自由领域的跨国差异，尤其是政府规模、法律制度和产权领域的跨国模式对比。 . 它表明，在概率投票框架中的某些似是而非的条件下，较高的一致性导致某些领域的经济自由度较高，而其他领域的经济自由度较低。所以，市场信念一致性的概念有助于我们理解为什么在法律制度和财产权方面经济自由得分较高的国家通常在政府规模方面的经济自由得分较低。本文使用四种不同市场信念的 Cronbach（系数）α 作为衡量跨国回归一致性的指标，发现一致性是两个经济自由领域的解释因素。