The Macau government's Secretariat for Economy and Finance said in a statement yesterday that it "will not issue any comment" on this week's announcement by the US-based conservative Heritage Foundation that it has removed Hong Kong and Macau from its annual "economic freedom index" report.
In the report, the foundation claimed that the central government controls the special administrative regions' economic policies these days.
The statement noted that the foundation based in Washington, DC, had included Macau in its annual index since 2009.
The statement underlined that the local government "strongly opposes the spreading of groundless and baseless claims through the issuing of self-styled reports [about Macau] by overseas bodies."
In the foundation's 2020 report, Macau was ranked as the world's 35th and Asia's ninth "freest" economy, while Hong Kong had headed the index for two decades until last year when Singapore topped the index.
