Where are you on the global pay scale? If there were no rich and
poor, and everyone had an equal share of the world's total pay
packet, how much would they earn? The total value of world
income is closing in on $70 trillion (£43.9tn) per year, and
there are seven billion people in the world, so the average
income is heading towards $10,000 (£6,273) per person per year.
Easy. But not everyone has a job and some of those seven billion
are children. So another question you could ask is: "What is the
world's average wage?" That is more tricky to answer, but a
group of economists at the United Nations' International Labour
Organization (ILO) has had a go, though they have never gone
public with this information. Until now. Let's consider the
scale of the Herculean task the number crunchers at the ILO set
themselves. First, they work out the total wage bill for every
country in the world. To do that they get the average salary
from each office for national statistics, and multiply that
amount by the number of earne