A few weeks ago, I blogged about Forbes’s Tax Misery list, which this year ranked France as the world’s most wretched national tax jurisdiction, thereby giving me an unmissable opportunity to diss that entire nation (my French friends still haven’t forgiven me).

But it seems that Forbes might have gotten it wrong, and I shouldn’t be picking on France after all.

It should be Italy.

And by the way (though this will come as no surprise to anyone), the United States isn’t exactly misery-free either.

It all depends on how you look at it, of course, and the latest look comes from Institut Constant de Rebecque, a Lausanne, Switzerland-based libertarian think tank that has concocted a “tax oppression index” that ranks the 30 member states of the OECD. (Fellow libertarian think tank Cato Institute linked to the report and added some comments here.)

The index examines taxation in a broader context than the Forbes research did. In addition to straightforward tax-burden measures — for example, tax as a percentage of GDP, corporate income tax rates, and VAT rates — it draws on World Bank data that purports to quantify public governance through criteria such as government effectiveness, rule of law, and control of corruption. And it throws in a third set of criteria related to financial privacy — for example, the presence or absence of laws to mandate bankers’ professional secrecy.

The results: Italy wins the World Cup for tax oppressiveness, followed closely by Turkey, Poland, and Mexico.

France ranks lower than those countries and a couple of others (Germany and the Netherlands), but still falls within the group of nations “with strong tax oppression,” according to the study.

The United States doesn’t do much better than France, tying with the United Kingdom for the dubious honor of top place (worst place) among the medium-tax-oppression countries.

The least oppressive country — no surprise — is Switzerland, beating out Luxembourg by an impressive margin.

All of which, of course, is grist to the libertarian think tank mill. Pierre Bessard, author of the report and executive director of the Institut Constant de Rebecque, has an axe to grind about the OECD’s (and now Barack Obama’s) campaign against “harmful tax competition,” and he grinds it loud and long. But there’s some thought-provoking argument here, not least in Bessard’s account of competition from tax havens, which, he insists, “does not lead to an unbridled fight towards zero taxation and does not endanger public services and investments, as its opponents would like to make us believe.” ###