SHAH ALAM - Malaysia ranked third in The Economist magazine's latest crony capitalism index, trailing behind Russia and Czezh Republic out of the 43 countries listed.
The index also named Singapore in the fourth place while Mexico was fifth.
The British weekly magazine calculated the index based on whether or not the people's livelihoods in the capitalist economies were easily influenced by crony capitalism or vice versa.
The index listed 43 countries, each with a Gross Domestic Product (GDP) exceeding US$250 billion (RM1.11 billion) and had estimated the total plutocrats profit from rent-seeking industries that benefit from the government's favouritism.
The Economist derives its index from the data used by Forbes to publish an annual list of the world's richest people and then classifies the source of wealth to rent-seeking sectors and vice versa.
Forbes had listed 2,640 billionaires with a total wealth of US$12 trillion (RM53.49 trillion), but most of them do not operate in the mentioned industry sector.
The Economists also informed that the wealth of Singapore's billionaires from the crony sector had amounted to more than 10 per cent of the country's GDP while 65 per cent of the global increase in crony-capitalist wealth was generated by the United States, China, India and Russia.