In truth, the economists at the ILO have had to rely on very patchy statistics. Data is missing for some countries - even a country as large as Nigeria, for example. And also, the economists at the ILO are only counting wage earners. They exclude huge numbers of people who appear in the poverty statistics but not in the calculations for the average wage - pensioners, children and stay-at-home parents, for example, and even the self-employed.
The number of self-employed is huge. But calculating the world's average salary is still an exercise worth doing, according to Belser. We always use Gross Domestic Product GDP as the reference, but I think we also have a whole lot of trouble understanding exactly what is the meaning of GDP, whereas wages are a much more obvious indicator of the quality of life. Let's say the following list represents the annual incomes of a small island country with a population of five:. So in this example, the mean and median incomes are identical because the distribution is symmetric.
An equal number of islanders have relatively high incomes and relatively low incomes. But this is quite unrealistic: in the real world, there are a few extremely rich people and many more people living in extreme poverty. Now let's imagine that two new people move to the island simultaneously: Alicia and Gerard. What would happen to the per capita income and the median income of the island? What would looking at that mean income number tell us? Not a whole lot, actually.
In contrast, the median is a more useful measure. Still, even the median fails to describe how well off the lowest income person on the island is. Though somewhat less extreme, precisely the same issues arise when we study real countries. The distribution of annual household income in the U. Data source: U. What is important to note about the chart above is the shape of the distribution. The shape indicates that many households are on the lower end of the distribution.
However, it has a long "tail," indicating that fewer households have very high incomes. As we saw in the island example above, the relatively small number of higher incomes affect the mean, but not necessarily the median. In cases like this, the mean income in a country might not be very representative of its average inhabitant. It's important, therefore, to consider the way that wealth is distributed. Both the mean and median personal and household incomes in the U.
The difference between mean and median income suggests high levels of inequality. If we want to know more about inequality, maybe we should try to measure it directly. There are several different ways to do this.
One of the most widely-used is the Gini index or "Gini coefficient". In simple terms, the Gini index is a measure of how equal a country's distribution of income is.
It is a score between 0 and 1, where 0 represents perfect equality and 1 represents perfect inequality. Americans' confidence in the economy is still slowly recovering from its government shutdown-induced plunge. Gallup's Economic Confidence Index averaged last week, up from in mid-October, but below the from mid-September. The U. Payroll to Population employment rate P2P was steady at Unadjusted unemployment rose to 8. These young people are also increasingly likely to say their standard of living is getting worse.
Notice: JavaScript is not enabled. Please Enable JavaScript Safely. Income Related to Prevalence of Full-Time Work for Employers Gallup's income measures are strongly associated with the proportion of adult residents in each country who say they are employed full time for an employer -- a measure Gallup refers to as "Payroll to Population.
Bottom Line In recent years, political leaders, policymakers, and academics have criticized the use of traditional macroeconomic indicators, such as per-capita gross domestic product or gross national income, as insufficient for characterizing the quality of life for a country's population. Ming-Yi Wu contributed to this report.
Average per capita income in Japan hit its highest point in , but has been decreasing ever since. Thanks to its exchange rate, Japan is a good place for U. Madagascar has one of the lowest per capita incomes in the world. Income in Mauritius rose steadily from to , but has remained about the same since then. However, the per capita income is 21 percent more than what it was in Norway is the richest country in the world, but the average income has actually been declining over the last couple of years.
The current per capita income in Norway is the lowest it has been since The average per capita income in Russia has dropped more than 34 percent between its peak in and Although income has been declining in recent years, the average income in Russia is now more than double what it was in The richest Russians make their billions through heavy industries like mining.
Singapore has the highest GNI per capita in all of Asia, and an average per capita income that is more than five times the worldwide average. The income in the African country is now the lowest it has been since Income has decreased in the European nation every year since then.
Fortunately, while the average income has decreased over the last two years, it has decreased less than 2 percent. The average GNI per capita in Thailand is just over half the worldwide average. The United States has the highest per capita income in North America. The average income in the U. The GNI per capita in the U. S is now more than double what it was in
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