From the UK's Executive Digital:

Deloitte has revealed that high-flying Chief Executives are thriving in the credit crunch even though the pace of pay rises in the boardrooms of Britain's top 350 companies has slowed in the economic downturn.

Directors of the UK’s largest companies enjoyed pay rises well above inflation with the average pay increase for bosses of the largest 350 companies on the FTSE share index standing at 6.2 percent.

However, this was down from seven percent the previous year.

The gap between the potential pay of the Chief Executive and the rest of the board is also increasing, according to the survey.

From The Economist:

How executives are rewarded is one of the many mysteries of China’s increasingly powerful companies.

A new study by Zhihong Chen and Yuyan Guan, of the City University of Hong Kong, and Bin Ke, of Pennsylvania State University, casts a rare beam of light.

The authors examine “red chips”—companies operating in China but incorporated abroad and listed in Hong Kong. For many years this was the main way in which big Chinese companies interacted with the capital markets. The 83 mostly state-controlled companies covered by the study’s final year of data, 2005, account for more than half of the stockmarket value of all Chinese firms and more than one-third of the capitalisation of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

Senior executives’ cash pay was low by global standards: $180,000 a year on average. Almost every firm awarded stock options, worth an average of $140,000, giving bosses healthy top-ups as well as equity stakes—if those options were exercised. Remarkably, a lot never were. At more than half of the firms, no options were exercised within four years of vesting.

From the Economic Times of India, a look at pay that is obscenely high relative to the company's earnings:

At a time when astronomical CEO compensation has come under scrutiny globally, a section of India Inc seems to believe that even sky isn’t the limit. A number of corporate honchos take home salaries disproportionate to the profits their respective companies generate.

In some cases, it is as high as 25% of the net profit. ETIG studied the compensation of top executives of public companies to draw up a list of obscenely paid execs.

Future Capital chief executive officer Sameer Sain tops the list with a compensation that is 24.3% of his company’s net profit. IL&FS Investsmart CEO James Whiteford and Bayer CropScience MD Stephen Gerlich grossed more than 10% of the net profit of the respective firms.

The conclusion of Executive Excess 2008:

Journalists have been writing about rising executive pay since the early 1980s. Over the past quarter-century, poll after poll has shown widespread public opposition to our contemporary CEO pay levels. Almost every high-ranking political leader in the United States has, at one time or another, expressed dismay over pay at America’s corporate summit. Surveys have found that even those individuals directly responsible for setting executive pay levels — the members of corporate boards of directors — feel we have a serious executive pay problem.

Yet, year after year, nothing changes. Executive pay continues to rise much faster than compensation elsewhere in the U.S. economy. Does all this mean that rising executive pay reflects some inexorable natural economic phenomenon? Not at all. Public policies, we have detailed in this edition of Executive Excess, have fueled the executive pay explosion. We can change public policies.

Historically, troubled economic times in the United States have helped generate long overdue public policy reforms. We have now entered troubled economic times, likely our worst since executive pay started ballooning in the 1980s. Ballooning executive pay has helped create our current economic woes. Deflating that excess can help end them.

A quick reference from Executive Excess 2008:

	Obama	McCain
Ending preferential capital gains treatment of carried interest	Supports	Opposes
Cap on unlimited deferred compensation	No position	No position
Ending offshore deferred compensation	No position	No position
Cap on tax deductibility of executive pay	No position	No position
Ending stock option accounting double standard	No position	No position  (supported similar bill in 2002)

From Executive Excess 2008:

The U.S. tax code currently is riddled with loopholes that allow top corporate and financial leaders to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. Still other loopholes allow corporations to claim unwarranted deductions for exorbitant executive pay. Ordinary taxpayers wind up picking up the bill. That’s why this report defines such loopholes as “subsidies for executive excess.”

Estimated Annual Cost to Taxpayers of the Five Most Direct Tax Subsidies for Excessive Executive Pay

1. Preferential capital gains treatment of carried interest $2,661,000,000
2. Unlimited deferred compensation $80,600,000
3. Offshore deferred compensation $2,086,000,000
4. Unlimited tax deductibility of executive pay $5,249,475,000
5. Stock option accounting double standard $10,000,000,000

Total $20,077,075,000

Executive Excess 2008 also looks at the pay of fund managers - which is usually ignored in general discussions of rising pay because such managers are not heads of publicly traded companies so many arguments levied against them do not apply. However, through the lens of beneficial tax treatment, fund managers may be more, not less, guilty. Here are the top 5 fund managers by pay in 2007 (no, these billion dollar numbers are not typos):

As promised, the beginning of an extensive look at the Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy's 15th annual CEO Compensation Survey, this year titled "Executive Excess 2008: How Average Taxpayers Subsidize Runaway Pay."

Key Findings

CEO-WORKER DIVIDE: S&P 500 CEOs last year averaged $10.5 million, 344 times the pay of typical American workers. Last year, the top 50 hedge and private equity fund managers averaged $588 million each, more than 19,000 times as much as typical U.S. workers earned.

TAXPAYER SUBSIDIES FOR EXECUTIVE PAY: Average U.S. taxpayers subsidize excessive executive compensation — by more than $20 billion per year — via a variety of tax and accounting loopholes.

INDIRECT TAXPAYER SUPPORT FOR RUNAWAY PAY: More than 85 percent of the public companies on the federal government’s top 100 contractors list paid their CEOs over 100 times the pay of average U.S. workers.

REFORM ROADBLOCKS: Legislation that would plug executive-friendly tax loopholes is already pending in Congress. But this legislation has stalled — and will likely remain stalled unless the November 2008 elections change current Congressional voting dynamics.