Average Disposable Wage of OECD Members
While GDP per capita is often used to measure how developed a country is, it includes components that do not directly contribute to a citizen's well-being. However, breaking down GDP to its components and measuring only wages and salaries gives a more accurate picture of the living standard of a country. Unlike the gross wage, which can be an inaccurate indicator of the well-being of a citizen since it does not represent the full amount of money the worker will be left to consume on goods or services, the disposable wage excludes compulsory deductions such as income tax, municipal tax, provincial/state income tax, social security (pension plan, medicare) and compulsory insurance. The list below has compulsory deductions applied with rates obtained from the OECD Tax Database, which includes figures for all personal compulsory payments assuming that the citizen is single with no children, with an income level 100% of the average wage. The gross employment income are shown for reference and all monetary values are based on the OECD's purchasing power parity exchange rates. Note that the OECD does not publish data for some countries and hence they are not listed.
Rank | Country | Disposable $ 2011 |
Disposable $ growth |
Compulsory deduction |
Gross $ 2011 |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | United States | 42,035 | 242 | 26.0% | 54,450 |
2 | Ireland | 41,170 | 531 | 18.9% | 50,764 |
3 | Luxembourg | 37,997 | -1,477 | 28.1% | 52,847 |
4 | Switzerland | 35,471 | -57 | 29.4% | 50,242 |
5 | Australia | 34,952 | 835 | 22.3% | 44,983 |
6 | United Kingdom | 33,513 | -1,272 | 25.1% | 44,743 |
7 | Canada | 32,662 | -648 | 22.7% | 42,253 |
8 | Norway | 31,101 | 913 | 29.3% | 43,990 |
9 | South Korea | 31,051 | 1,341 | 12.3% | 35,406 |
10 | Netherlands | 29,269 | -544 | 37.8% | 47,056 |
11 | Austria | 29,008 | -177 | 33.4% | 43,555 |
12 | Sweden | 28,301 | 480 | 25.0% | 37,734 |
13 | Denmark | 27,974 | -335 | 38.6% | 45,560 |
14 | Japan | 27,763 | 724 | 21.0% | 35,143 |
15 | France | 27,452 | 93 | 28.0% | 38,128 |
16 | Spain | 26,856 | -466 | 21.9% | 34,387 |
17 | Finland | 25,747 | 146 | 29.8% | 36,676 |
18 | Belgium | 25,642 | 25 | 42.2% | 44,364 |
19 | Germany | 24,174 | 379 | 39.9% | 40,223 |
20 | Italy | 23,194 | -562 | 30.8% | 33,517 |
21 | Greece | 21,352 | -2,039 | 18.8% | 26,295 |
22 | Portugal | 17,170 | -2,044 | 24.5% | 22,742 |
23 | Czech Republic | 15,115 | -191 | 23.0% | 19,630 |
24 | Slovakia | 14,701 | -328 | 22.9% | 19,068 |
25 | Poland | 14,389 | 189 | 28.3% | 20,069 |
26 | Hungary | 12,843 | 52 | 35.0% | 19,437 |
Read more about this topic: Developed Country
Famous quotes containing the words average, wage and/or members:
“One cannot develop taste from what is of average quality but only from the very best.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (17491832)
“My home policy: I wage war; my foreign policy: I wage war. All the time I wage war.”
—Georges Clemenceau (18411929)
“Every diminution of the public burdens arising from taxation gives to individual enterprise increased power and furnishes to all the members of our happy confederacy new motives for patriotic affection and support.”
—Andrew Jackson (17671845)