If you're a teacher in Luxembourg, you're in luck.
Using data from a recent OECD report, the World Economic Forum put together a chart showing in which 10 countries teachers with 10 years of experience who work in public institutions at the lower secondary level earn the most.
Luxembourg was No. 1 on the list. There, teachers with the aforementioned qualifications can earn a salary of $99,900 — or just shy of six figures.
That salary trumps that of the second-place country, Germany, where teachers earn around $65,843. Meanwhile, the United States came in sixth place at $53,758.
Notably, seven out of the 10 countries on the list are in Europe. The other three are the US, Australia, and Canada.
Interestingly, a working paper by Markus Nagler, Marc Piopiunik, and Martin R. West found that the quality of teachers goes up during recessions in the US.
The key factor here is that during recessions a teacher's salary is more attractive relative to the lower (expected) earnings in other professions. Therefore, people who might not otherwise have gone into teaching end up becoming teachers because they expect to earn more in that job than in others.
Given those findings, the authors noted that: "Intrinsic motivation seems to be of second-order importance relative to the effects of increasing teacher pay on selection when hiring more effective teachers."
And that suggests that if teachers were paid more relative to other professions, perhaps the overall quality of teachers would be improved as more capable people would choose to teach.
