NEW YORK (BLOOMBERG) - If your life's goal is to be a highly paid chief executive officer, the United States is the place. But if your dream is just to be richer than society, South Africa and India are great bets too.
In either case, probably best to avoid Thailand, Poland and China.
A Bloomberg ranking of CEO compensation at companies filling benchmark indexes in 25 of the world's largest economies shows the biggest paychecks - by far - are written in the US.
Heads of S&P 500 businesses get pay packages averaging US$16.9 million (S$23.8 million), about 2.6 times more than what their counterparts reap abroad. In second-place Switzerland, CEOs get 1.6 times the average.
Singapore comes in at no. 10 with FTSE Straits Times businesses getting pay packages worth US$5.6 million.
In China, pay is 90 per cent below the average - at least based on disclosures by companies in the Shanghai Shenzhen CSI 300 Index. They typically report annual compensation of about US$640,000. But heads of state-owned companies, for example, enjoy valuable perks including housing and entertainment that sometimes go unmentioned in filings.
The deck gets shuffled a bit in a second Bloomberg ranking, comparing CEO pay to estimated income generated per person - a rough gauge of what chiefs get relative to the society where their companies are listed. That puts pay for CEOs in South Africa and India ahead of the US.
There are myriad reasons behind the international disparities in packages.
One of most important is size. The US is home to many of the world's largest publicly traded corporations.Cost of living explains some of it, too. It's much more expensive to live lavishly in North America and Western Europe than in places like Thailand, where CEOs take home roughly US$60,000 - less than in every other nation ranked.
In other cases, it's cultural. In Japan, big paychecks are typically taboo because they're considered a sign of greed. And taxes and regulations matter.
Pay for top US executives has climbed quickly since the 1990s as boards increasingly used equity to reward bosses, letting companies take tax deductions for compensation linked to performance. Directors at global companies are under pressure from both investors who don't want to see bosses get rewarded if stocks don't go up, and executives who compare their paychecks with more highly-paid colleagues overseas.
In some places, growing pay levels have stoked the debate over income inequality, triggering a public backlash. Companies in countries including the UK and Spain now hold binding shareholder votes on executive pay every third year. The European Union moved in 2013 to limit performance-based awards at banks.
