Ron Bailey has an interesting piece at Reason about why the US is wealthy, exploding many leftist myths about exploitation and overconsumption of resources, slavery, etc. One point that I think should be added is that, while rule of law is important, if many of the laws are dumb and economically counterproductive, it's probably better to have less adherence to them than more.

I'd be interested to see a take on this from an Anglosphere perspective.

Hernando de Soto, the economist, not the conquistador, had made a similar point in his book The Mystery of Capital. A wikip3dia quote:

The main tenet of de Soto's books is that people in developing countries lack an integrated formal property system, leading to only informal ownership of land and goods. This makes it impossible for the poor to leverage their informal ownerships into capital (as collateral for credit), which de Soto claims would form the basis for entrepreneurship. Hence farmers in much of the developing world remain trapped in subsistence agriculture.

"Owning" a house is meaningless if you cannot sell it. Thus title insurance becomes a prerequisite to having a fluid market for real estate.

A passage from de Soto I found memorable is about how in the 3rd world cattle is sold one animal at a time with the buyer looking in the mouth of each specimen. In the U.S. an options trader can buy/sell 1,000,000 pork bellies by twitching a pinky finger.

Why? If fraud occurs the US Department of Justice will crack heads.

The rule of law thing seems intuitively weighted too heavy. Are they counting the money the kleptocrats are depositing in Switzerland in the Swiss numbers and not in the local figures? The Swiss banking laws may ironically be one of the reasons that the kelptocrats are so effective.

More generally, in confiscatory tax regimes, local money is held off shore or in portable foreign currency (e.g., $100 bills or Euros). I wonder how those resources are tabulated.

Sam, I suspect that a small fraction of what gets squandered ends up saved away. From running some numbers on a few western-style anecdotes, I get the impression that the average business scam nets the scammer 1-10% of what harm they cause. Lower rates seem to be more common.

So in the sense of counting wealth, these pilfered assets probably are negligiable to the net worth of the country that they came from. OTOH, given how much leverage some of these countries get, being able to increase the cost of corruption might have extraordinary benefits.