Elias, you can use the Index of Economic Freedom, papers and reports, as well as download the software from http://www.freetheworld.com/index.html (software download at the bottom of the page).

Of course, this is applicable if your question is in line with the following classic definition of economic freedom (the excerpt from the page):

Individuals have economic freedom when property they acquire without the use of force, fraud, or theft is protected from physical invasions by others and they are free to use, exchange, or give their property as long as their actions do not violate the identical rights of others. An index of economic freedom should measure the extent to which rightly acquired property is protected and individuals are engaged in voluntary transactions.

James Gwartney and Robert Lawson et al.

Economic Freedom of the World: 1996 Annual Report

As to the institutional change, depending on the context , there are various institutions and publications. Just search for example: institutional change, transition index, governance index.

Finally, if the question concerns the land then see "Checkerboards and Coase: Transactions Costs and Efficiency in Land Markets" by Randall Akee at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=947459

Send me ur email! I ll be attaching my papers on transaction costs and how u can measure them by monday

you should get more information by using the model of Hotelling(1929) or Salop(1979).

Dear Elias,

Majewski's theorem, which is a counterweight to Coase's theorem, may help to understand the behavior of transaction costs in the short and long term. The Majewski's theorem says that the more efficient economic institutes in evolutionary terms have a greater influence on the increase of the transaction costs.

For an additional explanation of such a non-standard position, it is useful to divide the transaction costs into specific and general and the efficiency of institutions onadaptive and evolutionary. Special transaction costs are the transaction costs per the monetary unit of investment. Overall transaction costs are the total costs of conducting transactions on the market. The adaptive efficiency of institutions is connected to minimizing the transaction costs of a special economic system that operates within the achieved level of complexity. Finally, the evolutionary efficiency of institutions, as pointed out by Majewski , reflects their ability to integrate i.e. to coalesce with the processes of deepening the division of labor, development of cooperative relations and complication of the economic system, leading to a general increase in transactional costs.

In short term, institutions increasingly show their limiting function, which causes an increase in specific transaction costs and reduction of the adaptive efficiency of institutions. In the long run, new institutions provide the means for producing more efficient information technology. The use of more efficient information technology reduces the risk in functioning of the institution, which, for example, reduces expenditures of writing contracts and increases the number of transactions in an economic system. Increasing the volume of transactions leads to the increased adaptive effectiveness of institutions, thus deepening the division of labor and intensity of the relations of cooperation. Finally, deepening the division of labor and the development of the cooperative lead to an increase in the overall transaction costs of an economic system.

I would like to second Guilherme Lambais. We have been struggling with similar questions in the context of analysing fresh fruits and vegetables markets in Africa. See our conceptual framework that we used: http://edepot.wur.nl/684.

I have already, in Robert S. Pindyck and Daniel Rubinfeld Microeconomis. seen a measure of externalities based on relation among marginal social cost and marginal production cost. Non-price factors are, indeed, difficult to measure, but they must be considered, for they impose to all of us the question of bringing Economic reality beyond a relationship among prices and prices as the only trustable indexes of its characters.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/287162366_Transaction_Banking_Services_The_Case_of_Bangladesh

Book Transaction Banking Services: The Case of Bangladesh