In Business | Why Hong Kong’s latest No 1 ranking was greeted with silence

You know how it is when Hong Kong tops a world comparison table: first comes a flurry of self-congratulatory articles, and then there will be a smug government statement to the effect that this confirms whatever it is supposed to confirm.

However, total silence followed the publication of a recent international survey by The Economist, drawing on material from the IMF, World Economic Forum and Forbes magazine.

Hong Kong has not only topped a world comparison league but did so by a mile.

The simple reason for the silence that followed this news is explained by the table's title: the crony-capitalism index. Hong Kong ranks No1 by a long shot, followed by Russia and Malaysia. Even Indonesia, much criticised for excessive crony capitalism, is ranked in 10th place, making Hong's Kong's reigning position that bit more "impressive".

The Economist league table is designed to identify economies that are dominated by "rent seekers". In other words, it looks at the fortunes of business leaders who have been able to secure a larger share of the business pie not by helping to expand the size of their local economies but by grabbing a larger share of the pie itself.

The Economist defines economic rent as being "the difference between what people are paid and what they would have to be paid for their labour, capital, land [or any other inputs into production] to remain in current use". As ever, an index of this kind is open to challenges, because there are lapses in data, especially from places such as China.