Russia’s ‘oil-for-knowledge’ scheme

Whenever you fill up your European compact car’s gas tank, or that of your American SUV, you pay as much as a Russian schoolteacher earns in a month. And every time you pay, you subsidize a regime that relies on energy, not information, as its main product. You finance the pre-modern and the inefficient, and perhaps worse: every time you pay, you may be collaborating with political evil.

..Russia exposes an ugly truth of our era: illiberal societies can grow just as fast – even faster – than open ones. Oil-rich states need global networks to sell their oil, to export their capital, and to import technologies and technologists. Among current United Nations members, countries with large natural resource endowments are also more likely to have a non-democratic regime.

The Korea Herald