This chapter traces developments in the energy sector from the systemic crisis under Gorbachev, through Russia’s difficult start after the collapse of the Soviet Union, to the consolidation of Russia under Putin.

This chapter examines a key aspect of the worldwide sanctions response: sanctioning individuals personally, including wealthy oligarchs holding vast, often-hidden wealth. This chapter explores how and why certain individuals were sanctioned, like Putin’s daughters and prominent Russian government and business figures. Lesser-known sanctioned figures are also discussed. It also discusses the difficulties of linking assets to sanctioned individuals once wealth is laundered and converted into certain types of assets. The chapter discusses measures taken by various jurisdictions to improve the effectiveness of sanctions by promoting financial transparency.

This chapter devises a synthetic ordering of the factors identified as impeding long-run development in Benin, namely corruption, weak public management, opacity of public decision-making and policy implementation, and excessive informality. These institutional weaknesses are traced back to proximate and ultimate causes, while in the other direction the economic consequences of these weaknesses are unfolded. We identify the immediate causes as political instability, elite capture of key state functions, weakness of the state, and the possibility of easy but illegal rents. In turn, these causes are linked to five deep factors: (1) neo-patrimonialism with multiple oligarchs; (2) a multiple ethnic groups; (3) a geographical/neighbourhood landscape in which Benin appears as a small country that possesses a long border with its big neighbour (Nigeria); (4) a legacy of centralised management of key economic sectors, dating back to the French colonial period; and (5) the heavy presence of aid agencies. Policy reforms aiming at overcoming or circumventing these institutional problems are then discussed.

Business groups are ubiquitous in Asia. They are networks of firms bound together through formal and informal family ownership. Some are massive; most are highly diversified, and they are often the dominant players in their home country. Business groups are a uniquely well-suited format for the connections world. Opaque cross-holdings and pyramids of stocks ensure that families can exert effective control, even if their actual shareholdings are relatively small, and provide opportunities for playing reciprocity games with politicians, civil servants and members of other oligarchic dynasties. Although there are examples of efficient and well-run business groups, most are not. Furthermore, while it has often been argued that business groups are a response to institutional and market weaknesses – for example in relation to securing finance – they have not faded with growth and the improvement in institutions. Rather, we show how business groups have become more entrenched in Asia over time and their revenues constitute a huge share of GDP. Such concentrated ownership has also had an impact on extreme wealth, with a staggering growth in the number of billionaires.

The phenomenon of post-soviet oligarchs in Russia, Ukraine, and others is so well-known it needs little definition; however, how exactly it came about and how this was related to economic reforms is often misunderstood – this chapter relies on extensive earlier studies to summarize the main explanations. Littler-known is the embryonic start of most oligarchs under the partial reforms of Gorbachev, allowing for the first time private enterprise with the 1997–1998 Laws on Cooperatives. With no market liberalization for prices or foreign trade, these new companies could only prosper by using insider connections to intermediate between state firms and thus skim off profits and assets. The cleverest and best-connected rapidly accumulated hordes of cash and established pocket-banks, preparing for future open privatization of state firms. The notorious episode of Loans-for-Shares in Russia may not have been the largest part of actual privatization, but illustrates well the nontransparent quasi-legal “stealing” of state assets that the population saw this to be, and due to this believed that market reforms in general were bad for the people. The reality that this could only happen because reforms were very partial did not change such perceptions, even to the present day.