This is More or Less, your statistical guide to life, the universe, and everything.

The programme now airs year-round on the BBC World Service, but this is a full-length episode

from Radio 4. Hello and welcome to More or Less, opening cans of statistical

whoopass since 2001. This week is the Greek rail system so inefficient that it would be cheaper

to send every one of its passengers by taxi. And our men better at chess than women.

We look at the numbers. But first, our Britain's executives overpaid.

It's a question which has been widely discussed this week after Andrew Moss, chief executive

of the insurance firm Aviva, was forced out by shareholders, who are it seems no longer content

to watch him trowze a £50,000 a week. There are other recent examples of shareholders flexing

their corporate muscles, prompting the suggestion that we're witnessing a shareholder spring,

an insurgency which might be strengthened by the government's plans, announced in this

week's Queen's speech, to make shareholder votes on pay binding. But as the BBC's business

editor Robert Pestin has pointed out, there's little evidence that shareholders are against

high pay as such. There's a saying, after all, pay peanuts, get monkeys. What's infuriating

shareholders is they seem to be paying millions of pounds and getting monkeys anyway.

Aviva's share price, for example, fell nearly 60 per cent during Mr Moss's tenure.

All this got us thinking about the link between pay and performance. Our Britain shareholders

getting value for money from their highly paid chief executives. Earlier this year,

a Swiss financial research company called Obermat analysed the pay and performance of the top

hundred companies in the United States. Their research came to a startling conclusion,

that there is no correlation between pay and performance in the US.

More or less asked Dr Herman Stern from Obermat to apply exactly the same analysis,

...