Mar 12th 2022
ALTHOUGH BILLIONAIRES have been getting a bad rap for years, the sanctions levied at Russian oligarchs have intensified scrutiny on the origins of tycoons’ wealth. On March 1st President Joe Biden announced that his government was setting up a “klepto capture” task force to “go after the crimes of Russian oligarchs”.
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The murky money sloshing around the favoured plutocratic playgrounds of New York, London and Paris is nothing new. In 2014 The Economist devised a crony-capitalism index to measure whether the world was experiencing a new gilded age, characterised by the modern equivalent of the robber barons in late-19th-century America. In 2016, when we last visited our index, we found that crony-capitalists had thrived during the 2000s but were beginning to feel the heat from trustbusters in the rich world and anti-corruption purges in developing countries. How has crony capitalism performed since?
Rent-seeking entrepreneurs tend to use their relationships with the state to maximise profits. Technically speaking, an economic rent is the surplus remaining once capital and labour have been paid a market price. With perfect competition that surplus would not exist. But rents can be artificially elevated if firms win contracts at beneficial prices, form cartels to stitch up consumers or lobby governments for favourable rules. Most rent-seeking businesses are operating perfectly legally.
Our index uses 25 years of data from Forbes’s annual stock-take of the world’s billionaires. In 2021 the publication listed 2,755 individuals with total estimated wealth of $13trn. We have classified the main source of each billionaire’s wealth into crony and non-crony sectors. Our crony sectors include a host of industries that are vulnerable to rent-seeking because of their proximity to the state, such as banking, casinos, defence, extractive industries and construction. We have aggregated the data according to billionaires’ country of citizenship expressed as a share of its GDP.
Russia’s crony economy sticks out like a blinged-up Muscovite in the Algarve. Some 70% of the 120 Russian billionaires, who together hold 80% of its billionaire wealth, fall within our crony-capitalist definition. Wealth equivalent to 28% of Russia’s GDP in 2021 came from crony sectors, …….
