Of course, Thaksin s rule had a dark underside corruption, legislated conflicts of interest, cronyism, human rights violations, and abuse of power, among other evidence of misrule.

Either outcome would mean that the Chief Executive has missed an opportunity to send the right signal that Hong Kong stands for good public governance rather than cronyism.

20. Market imperfections were exacerbated in many developing countries by such factors as cronyism, lack of skills and transparency and also information gaps, which made it difficult for market actors to properly assess risks and returns.

Plans to allow foreign investment in retailing and other key economic sectors have been put on hold. In critical industries mobile communications and mining are perhaps the two most important examples privatization has been corrupted by cronyism.

Cronyism was rife and the murder rate tripled, partly owing to corruption in the police and the justice system. Chávez s petro diplomacy sometimes took bizarre forms, like providing cheap bus travel for Londoners to please London s left wing mayor, Ken Livingstone.

But to strengthen a Ukraine plagued by corruption and cronyism, and heavily burdened by Russian aggression and destabilization, is no easy task. The election on Sunday must give rise to a government that is truly determined to bring radical reform to the country.

So they imagine the property rights acquired through cronyism, nepotism, and backroom dealing as somehow emerging from a Lockean realm of freedom. When my government questioned this assumption, they cried out that this was interference by the state with legitimate property rights.

Securing Iraq therefore requires a formidable force to be in place, which is why US President Barack Obama s strategy includes rebuilding the Iraqi army. But doing so will require overcoming three related obstacles Iraqi leaders military inexperience corruption and cronyism and ambiguity regarding the extent of external support.

Asia needs more help with infrastructure investment than the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank can provide China can play a useful leadership role and the participation of countries with high governance standards can help prevent the cronyism, corruption, and environmental damage to which large scale infrastructure projects are prone.

Greece s public sector is rife with clientelism (to gain votes) and cronyism (to gain favors) far more so than in other parts of Europe. Maximum pensions for public employees relative to wages are nearly twice as high as in Spain the government favors business elites with tax free status and some state employees draw their salaries without actually turning up for work.

By contrast, Ukraine became the worst managed of all the post Soviet states, with cronyism and corruption thwarting productive capacity, and causing the country to fall further and further behind other post communist countries in transition. Most notable is the comparison with Poland at independence, the two countries had roughly the same GDP per capita today, Poland s is more than three times higher.

Iraq s government is demanding a withdrawal timetable from the US, not because it believes that Iraqi forces will be ready to take over soon, but to burnish its nationalist credentials ahead of next year s parliamentary elections. Thus, it hopes to divert public attention from still non existent basic services, continuing sectarianism, weak oil production, scant infrastructure investment, and rampant corruption and cronyism.

Russia has most of the usual features of rentier states autocracy, weak political and judicial institutions, arbitrary governance, lack of the rule of law, little transparency, restraints on freedom of expression, widespread corruption, cronyism, and nepotism. Also common to rentier states are short investment horizons, vulnerability to commodity price volatility euphoria when they surge, crisis when they collapse and an underdeveloped and uncompetitive manufacturing sector.

The other key lesson from Singapore is that single party rule has retained popular legitimacy by delivering inclusive growth and equality of opportunity in a multi ethnic society, and by eliminating corruption of all kinds, including cronyism and excessive influence for vested interests. What Singapore s founder, Lee Kwan Yew, and his colleagues and successors understood is that the combination of single party rule and corruption is toxic.