This article was published on March 30, 2012

Want to know where you are on the global pay scale? This Web tool will let you know.


Want to know where you are on the global pay scale? This Web tool will let you know.

Whether you have a part-time paper-round or you’re on a six-figure salary, sometimes it helps to get a little perspective on how much you’re earning compared to others around the world.

As such, the BBC has produced this handy little Web tool that lets you establish exactly what you earn compared to both the country you live in, other countries around you, and the world average.

You simply enter your monthly salary and it tells you, in percentage terms, what you earn compared to others around the world.

Using data from a group of economists at the International Labour Organization (ILO), the information is published here for the first time, and is a rough number based on figures from 72 countries. It also omits some of the world’s poorest nations, such as Nigeria, to prevent the data from being skewed.

Furthermore, all figures are adjusted to reflect cost-of-living variations between countries. And only wage earners are included, so self-employed or people on benefits aren’t part of this data-set. For some countries, the data is incomplete too – in South Africa, for example, it doesn’t include public sector and agricultural workers, while for Uganda it covers only the manufacturing sector.

It’s actually a lot more complex to work out than you’d think, and to see the full explanation of how the figures were derived, click here.

Where are you on the global pay scale?

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