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Politicization of economic activity means the exercise of control rights over firms by politicians and bureaucrats. In most countries politicians maintain property rights in firms, typically in the form of residual control rights as defined by Sanford Grossman and Oliver Hart (1986). These control rights may have served an ideological agenda in the past, but they are often used to further the private agenda of politicians and bureaucrats. A recent literature has established the presence of these problems in countries as diverse as Peru, France, Russia, and Ukraine (Hernando de Soto, 1989; Andrei Shleifer and Robert Vishny, 1993, 1994; Kaufmann and Paul Siegelbaum, 1997; Shleifer, 1997). But how widespread are these rights and how damaging are their effects around the world? The usual presumption in the economics lit-erature is that a predatory government simply leads to lower total economic activity, but for Eastern …