Saturday, January 31, 2009

From Financial Times

Sometimes dubbed the world’s most socialist country, Japan never went in for the CEO cult. On average, big company executives earn about three times as much as the rank-and-file – comfortably within the four-fold ideal espoused by Plato two and a half millennia ago.

That is also a far more modest gap than the 39 times differential prevailing among FTSE 350 board members and employees, as measured by research house IDS. It is not even in the same universe as the US, where the left-leaning Institute for Policy Studies reckons CEOs take home 344 times more than the average worker.