The deck gets shuffled a bit in a second Bloomberg ranking, comparing CEO pay to estimated income generated per person -- a rough gauge of what chiefs get relative to the society where their companies are listed. That puts pay for CEOs in South Africa and India ahead of the US.
There are myriad reasons behind the international disparities in packages. One of most important is size.
The US is home to many of the world's largest publicly traded corporations.
Cost of living explains some of it, too. It's much more expensive to live lavishly in North America and Western Europe than in places like Thailand, where CEOs take home roughly US$60,000 -- less than in every other nation ranked.
In other cases, it's cultural. In Japan, big paychecks are typically taboo because they're considered a sign of greed.
And taxes and regulations matter.
Pay for top US executives has climbed quickly since the 1990s as boards increasingly used equity to reward bosses, letting companies take tax deductions for compensation linked to performance.
In China, pay is 90 per cent below the average -- at least based on disclosures by companies in the Shanghai Shenzhen CSI 300 Index.
Directors at global companies are under pressure from both investors who don't want to see bosses get rewarded if stocks don't go up, and executives who compare their paychecks with more highly-paid colleagues overseas.
In some places, growing pay levels have stoked the debate over income inequality, triggering a public backlash. Companies in countries including the UK and Spain now hold binding shareholder votes on executive pay every third year. The European Union moved in 2013 to limit performance-based awards at banks.
In the US, businesses will at least be required to disclose more, comparing a CEO's pay with the median worker's starting in 2017. President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to issue a temporary moratorium on new regulations that aren't "compelled by Congress or public safety."
Such comparisons aren't simple. Bloomberg's ranking of CEO pay against earnings across society bases income generated per person on gross domestic product per capita, adjusted for purchase-price parity.
It's not a perfect measure: GDP measures just the value of goods and services produced, not how they were distributed.
The figures show that CEOs in South Africa and India take home more than the estimated income generated by an average worker -- out-earning their American colleagues on a relative basis.
Each country's compensation figure is based on the average CEO pay package for companies in one major stock index, weighted by market capitalization. The pay, disclosed in public filings, includes any salary, bonuses, value of perquisites and non-cash pay such as equity awards, deferred-compensation programs and pensions.
