Our crony-capitalism index offers a window into Russia’s billionaire wealth

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”.

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?