came top in four of the factors, second and third in another two and fourth in three, coming top overall. Nonetheless, the impact of the privatisation of British Rail has been the subject of much debate, with the stated benefits including improved customer service, and more investment; and stated drawbacks including higher fares, lower punctuality and increased rail subsidies. Privatizations in Russia and Latin America were accompanied by large-scale corruption during the sale of the state-owned companies. Those with political connections unfairly gained large wealth, which has discredited privatization in these regions. While media have widely reported the grand corruption that accompanied those sales, according to research released by the World Bank there has been increased operating efficiency, daily petty corruption is, or would be, larger without privatization, and that corruption is more prevalent in non-privatized sectors. Furthermore, according to the World Bank extralegal and unofficial activities are more prevalent in countries that privatized less. Other research suggests that privatization in Russia resulted in a dramatic rise in the level of economic inequality and a collapse in GDP and industrial output. Russian President Boris Yeltsin's IMF-backed rapid privatization schemes saw half the Russian population fall into destitution in just several years as unemployment climbed to double digits by the early to mid 1990s. A 2009 study published in The Lancet medical journal has found that as many as a million working men died as a result of economic shocks associated with mass privatization in the former Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe during the 1990s, although a further study suggested that there were errors in their method and "correlations reported in the original article are simply not robust." A subsequent body of scholarship, while still controversial, demonstrates that rapid privatization schemes associated with neoliberal economic reforms did result in poorer health outcomes in former Eastern Bloc countries during the transition to markets economies, with the World Health Organization contributing to the debate by stating "IMF economic reform programs are associated with significantly worsened tuberculosis incidence, prevalence, and mortality rates in post-communist Eastern European and former Soviet countries." Historian Walter Scheidel, a specialist in ancient history, posits that economic inequality and wealth concentration in the top percentile "had been made possible by the transfer of state assets to private owners." In Latin America, on the one hand, according to John Nellis's research for Center for Global Development, economic indicators, including firm