Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
Where Billionaire Crony Capitalists Live
Where Billionaire Crony Capitalists Live
Dec 13, 2025 5:12 PM

It’s never easy ing a billionaire, but the path to achieving a 10-figure level of wealth is smoother when you have the government as a business partner.

Crony capitalism is a general term for the range of activities in which particular individuals or businesses in a market economy receive government-granted privileges over their customers petitors. Certain industries (like casinos and real estate) and some nations (Russia, the Philippines) are more prone to cronyism than others. So if you want to e get ultra-rich it helps to be an business and country (e.g., an pany in Mexico) where the government will you gain an advantage in the market.

The Economist has put together an interesting interactive infographic showing where crony capitalist billionaires live around the world. As they explain:

Using data from a list of the world’s billionaires and their worth published by Forbes we label each individual as crony or not based on the source of their wealth. Industries that have a lot of interaction with the state are vulnerable to crony capitalism (a full list of industries is provided in the table below). These activities are often legal but always unfair (Donald Trump, a casino and property tycoon, earns the 104th spot in our individual crony ranking). We aggregate the billionaires by their home country and express the total wealth as percentage of GDP. The results are presented above for 22 economies: the five largest rich ones, the ten biggest for which reliable data are available and a selection of other countries where cronyism is a problem.

The United States ranks rather low on the list, but mostly because we have both a large economy and a lot of billionaires (whose wealth as a percentage of es from non-crony sectors. In some countries, like Malaysia, the only billionaires are the ones that in crony-related industries.

Overall, though, crony-based wealth is on the rise: the worth of billionaires in crony industries soared by 385 percent between 2004 and 2014, to $2 trillion.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
John Stonestreet On Religious Persecution, Restrictions Of Liberty
In today’s Christian Post, Breakpoint’s John Stonestreet says it is “bogus” to claim “others have it worse” when es to religious persecution as a way of denying claims of the loss of religious liberty here in the West. Now, let me first state the obvious: Nothing happening here or elsewhere in the West can remotely pared to what Christians in the Islamic world undergo on a daily basis. Our first and second response should be to pray for them, and...
Apple Watch: Forbidden Fruit?
Over at Think Christian today I examine some of the moral implications surrounding the announced release of the new Apple Watch. In the background of my thinking was a TEDxPuget Sound talk by Simon Sinek that focuses on identifying the “why” of organizations. It’s important to ask the “why” of our consumption as well, which is why I want to know of moral justifications for purchasing something like a $10,000 gold Apple Watch. Please pass along your suggestions in ments...
Abraham Kuyper on ECT
Evangelicals and Catholics Together (ECT) is celebratingitstwentieth anniversary. First Things, whose first publisher Richard John Neuhaus was a founding ECT member, is hosting a variety of reflections on ECT’s two decades, and in its latest issue published a new ECT statement, “The Two Shall e One Flesh: Reclaiming Marriage.” The first ECT statement was put out in 1994. But as recalled by Charles W. Colson, another founding member of ECT, the foundations of evangelical and Roman Catholic dialogue go back...
Women Of Liberty: Isabel Paterson
“If there were just one gift you could choose, but nothing barred, what would it be? We wish you then your own wish: you name it. Our is liberty, now and forever.” Isabel Paterson came to influence the likes of Ayn Rand and William F. Buckley, but her early life was rough and tumble. One of nine children, Paterson had only two years of formal education but loved to read. Her father had a difficult time making a living and...
The Real War on Christianity
In the Middle East, the Islamic State is crucifying Christians and demolishing ancient churches, write Bethany Allen-ebrahimian and Yochi Dreazen at Foreign Policy. Why is this being met with silence from the halls of Congress to Sunday sermons? Every holiday season, politicians in America take to the airwaves to rail against a so-called “war on Christmas” or “war on Easter,” pointing to things like major retailers wishing shoppers generic “happy holidays.” But on the subject of the Middle East, where...
Clergy, Innovation, and Economics
This is a bit second-hand (a source drawing from another source), but I still think the following tidbit on the modern history of clergy and scientific and technological development and discovery in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries from Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile is notable: Knowledge formation, even when theoretical, takes time, some boredom, and the freedom es from having another occupation, therefore allowing one to escape the journalistic-style pressure of modern publish-and-perish [sic, probably intentionally] academia to produce cosmetic knowledge, much...
Last Day: Free Download of ‘A Vulnerable World’
Today is the last day you can get a free copy of Acton’s latest monograph, “A Vulnerable World: The High Price of Human Trafficking” by Elise Hilton. Visit Amazon before midnight to download. For more information about the monograph and human trafficking, visit Vulnerable.World. Pope Francis has called human trafficking “an open wound on the body of contemporary society.” This monograph discusses both the economic and moral fall-out of modern-day slavery. ...
Russia and Ukraine: An Exceptional Love Affair?
In a meeting with young historians last fall, Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed the annexation of Crimea (RT described this delicately as “the newly returned” Crimea) and reminded them that “Prince Vladimir [Sviatoslavich the Great] was baptized, and then he converted Russia. The original baptismal font of Russia is there.” Matthew Dal Santo, a fellow at the Saxo Institute at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, uses a public exhibition of art in Moscow (Orthodox Rus. My History: The Rurikids) to...
The FCC’s Attack on Religious Liberty
What are we to think of net neutrality? No, seriously, that’s not a rhetorical question—I just can’t remember which side I support. I’ve written about net neutrality at least a half-dozen times (including an explainer piece) and yet for the life of me I can never remember which is the most pro-freedom, pro-market side. Is it opposing neutrality, supporting neutrality, being neutral on neutrality? Opposed, I think. I’m pretty sure it’s opposed. Perhaps that type of confusion is why so...
Vatican Endorses Military Force to Stop ISIS
In a first for the United Nations’ Human Rights Council, 70 countries signed a joint statement specifically addressing the plight of Christians and other minorities in the Middle East. But the Vatican is asking that even more be done for persecuted believers in that region. The Vatican’s top diplomat at the United Nations in Geneva has called for a coordinated international force to stop the “so-called Islamic State” in Syria and Iraq from further assaults on Christians and other minority...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved