KUALA LUMPUR, May 3 — Malaysia dropped one place to third in the latest index published yesterday by The Economist that measures how rampant crony-capitalism in a particular country is.

Despite the decline, however, the wealth of Malaysia’s billionaires still totalled more than a tenth of the South-east Asian nation’s 2023 gross domestic product (GDP).

Russia remains at the top of the list of 18 countries measured by the index followed by the Czech Republic. Russian oligarchs’ wealth accounted for close to a fifth of its GDP.

Singapore sat at number four in the index, where the total wealth of the country’s billionaires that profited from "crony sectors” stood at 10 per cent of GDP.

Overall, the wealth of crony billionaires had risen from US$315 billion or 1 per cent of GDP 25 years ago to US$3 trillion (RM13.37 trillion) today or double in GDP terms, according to the UK-based business magazine, which noted that almost two-thirds of the increase came from the United States, China, India and Russia.

As such, 40 per cent of crony-capitalist wealth derives from autocratic countries and amounts to 9 per cent of their GDP.

The magazine said its index extrapolates and calculates data from Forbes, the US-based financial magazine.

The index looks at the total wealth of the world’s billionaires who are active mainly in rent-heavy industries and compares that total to world GDP to get a sense of its scale.

"The higher the ratio, the more likely the economy suffers from a severe case of crony-capitalism,” it said.

There are currently some 311 billionaires around the world whose riches are largely believed "to derive from sectors which often feature chummy dealings with the state”, the magazine noted.