Italy, deep in the midst of a national bout of soul searching over their enormously wasteful state (for example, read about Mario Monti's New Year's Eve dinner here), has had its national statistics office look into exactly how much money politicians get paid in different countries.

The resulting study revealed the base salaries that each EU country's politicians earned along with a look at the perks and expenses that politicians can also claim as part of their living.

Taking this data (and additional, slightly older, data from the Directorate General of the European Parliament) we've compiled a list of which EU countries pay their serving politicians the best.

Now if this list is logical, as Ezra Klein has noted, it would roughly correlate with the GDP of the countries. Of course, it doesn't! And somehow we're betting you might be able to guess who comes in at number 1...

(Please note: that we haven't included expenses, just base salary. Of course there are some very substantial perks at work for some of these politicians.)