The pay gap between U.S. CEOs and average workers is higher than anywhere else in the developed world.

In the U.S. the average chief executive earned more than $11 million last year in salary, stock options and other compensation. new analysis by the Economic Policy Institute found. That’s around 231 times more than average workers.

That ratio has shrunk a bit since the height of the dot.com bubble, when a ballooning stock market inflated CEO compensation to 411 times that of working stiffs.

And it’s smaller than the pay gap calculated recently by the AFL-CIO, the umbrella federation of unions representing about 12 million U.S. workers. Their analysis concluded that the typical CEO of an S&P 500 Index company made 380 times the average wages of U.S. workers in 2011.

Whatever. What’s clear is that the pay gap between U.S. CEOs and rank-and-file workers is higher than anywhere else in the developed world. And it has been accelerating over the last few decades. In 1965, the U.S. CEO-to-worker compensation ratio was roughly 20 to 1.

Here are some additional stats to put the oh! in CEO:

— 725%: That’s how much average CEO compensation increased between 1978 and 2011, according to EPI.

— 5.7%: That’s how much the average worker’s compensation increased over the same period.

Bottom line: It pays to be CEO.

Photo credit: Critter Crap

Via LA Times