This Is the Country With the Highest Average Net Income

The distance between the poorest nation in the world and the richest can be measured in several ways. Among these are gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, net income and the number of millionaires (or billionaires more recently).

According to World Bank data, the top nation based on GDP per capita is Monaco at $190,512. At the bottom of the list is Burundi at $239.

Based on the billionaire count, the United States leads the world at 724, followed by China at 698 and India at 140. The figure for India is somewhat surprising. While it is the second-largest nation in the world based on population, it is also one of the poorest.

Then there is the income yardstick. Crowdsourced global database Numbeo has computed the average monthly net (after-tax) salary in some 109 countries. 24/7 Wall St. drew on its data to show the nation with the highest take-home pay.
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It may surprise no one to learn that the most prosperous country on the list, by a good measure, is Switzerland. Perhaps more unexpectedly, economically thriving South Korea, which boasts the fourth-largest GDP in Asia, takes the bottom place, followed by two generally affluent Western European countries, Austria and Belgium.

24/7 Wall St. relied on data obtained from Numbeo on August 23, 2021, including its metrics related to cost of living, property prices and quality of life in cities and countries worldwide. Numbeo showed the average monthly net salary for the 109 countries with sufficient numbers of contributors. Numbeo aggregates data for countries in real time. Data may be subject to change over relatively short periods, compared to government data sets.

Population and employment figures came from the World Bank and are for 2019, the latest year for which data was available.

A country’s average salary can illuminate some aspects of its economy, but it tells us nothing about wealth distribution, of course. The United States has the fifth-highest average after-tax salary, at $3,560 a month. Yet, a full-time employee working a job for the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour brings in only $1,160 a month. That is just over the $1,000 a month for a worker in New York State, for instance, and about on a par with the average take-home pay in Slovakia or Lebanon.

The country where people have the highest average net income is Switzerland. Here are the details:

• Average monthly salary after taxes: $6,247
• Employment to population ratio: 64.2%
• Population: 8,575,280

Click here to see all the countries where people have the highest average net incomes.
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