Where CEOs get most buck for bang

IF your life’s goal is to be a highly paid CEO, the US 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 pay cheques are written in the US.

Heads of S&P 500 businesses get pay packages averaging $16.9-million (about R246.4-million), about 2.6 times more than what their counterparts reap abroad. In second-place Switzerland, CEOs get 1.6 times the average.

In China, pay is 90% below the average — at least based on disclosures by companies in the Shanghai Shenzhen CSI 300 Index.

They typically report annual compensation of about $640 000. But heads of state-owned companies have 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.

The figures show that CEOs in South Africa and India take home more than the estimated income generated by an average worker — outearning their US colleagues on a relative basis. —