Gas Prices At The Pump: Europeans Pay Almost Twice As Much As US Residents

There’s little U.S. residents enjoy more than complaining about gas prices, but paying $3.55 a gallon -- the current average price at the pump, according to GasBuddy.com -- is chump change compared to the prices consumers in other countries pay.

The average U.S. resident actually pays anywhere between $2 and $0.90 less than the actual market value of gasoline because of government subsidies.

In Turkey, where the government finds the fuel tax relatively easy to enforce compared to other taxes, gasoline costs $9.98 at the pump. About 40 percent of the country’s workforce have under-the-table jobs and do not pay taxes, which is why the fuel tax is an important source of revenue that Turkey cannot easily afford to alter.

Norway is a major oil producing country, but the average Norwegian has to shell out $9.97 for a gallon of gas, more than twice the U.S. average. Norway doesn’t subsidize fuel at the pump; instead, it uses oil profits to fund free college education and infrastructure development.

Most Europeans pay a much higher price for gasoline than Americans do, anywhere between $6 and $10 more per gallon.

In oil producing countries in the Middle East like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, gas is dirt cheap. Saudi Arabians pay only $0.45 a gallon at the pump, while those in Kuwait pay just $0.80.

But nowhere in the world is gas quite as cheap as it is in Venezuela. At $0.04 a gallon, it’s practically free. In Venezuela, it costs about $1.56 to fill up the 39-gallon tank of a Chevrolet Suburban, according to calculations from Bloomberg, compared to $137.28 in the U.S. and $389.22 in Turkey.

Check out this interactive map of gasoline prices at the pump in 60 countries. Click on any country to see how much gas costs, and what that means for the people who live there.

For example, in India, gas costs about $4.36 a gallon, which may seem comparable to U.S. gas prices but really isn’t. This is because per capita income is much lower in India than in the U.S. -- the cost of a single gallon of gas in India is about 16 percent more than the average Indian worker earns in one day; in the U.S., the average price of a gallon of gas is less than half of the federal minimum wage for one hour of work.

The data used to create this map was sourced from Bloomberg and Associates for International Research Inc. (AirInc).