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This is more or less, the program in which the numbers always add up. We make an addition

of the program for BBC Radio 4, but this episode was broadcast on the World Service.

Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service. We are a weekly guide to

the numbers in the news and in life, and I'm Tim Harford. This week, we rank the world's

top military forces. But first, we answer this question from a listener, Karthik.

People have been complaining recently about income inequality. If there was perfect income

equality worldwide and everybody earned the same amount of money, how much would they earn?

And how does that compare to the current situation? Well, the total value of world income is

closing in on $70 trillion per year, and there are 7 billion people in the world, so the

average income is heading towards $10,000 per person per year. Easy. But not everyone has

a job, some of those 7 billion are children. So another question you could ask is what is

the world's average wage, and that is more tricky to answer. Ruth Alexander's here.

Yes, hello, some economists at the United Nations International Labour Organisation have been

trying to answer exactly this question. They have an answer, but they've never gone public

with this information. Until now, but before we release this figure into the world,

let's spend some time appreciating the difficulty of the Herkulean task the ILO boffin set themselves.

First, they worked out the total wage bill for every country in the world. To do that,

they got the average salary from each office for national statistics and multiplied that amount

by the number of earners in each country, which is important because it means you're giving more

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