The Oil Drum: Europe

"But it may well be that Italy will be the first industrialized country in the world to experience peak oil for real. Economically weak, strongly dependent on fossil fuels, Italy, despite being known as the "Sun Country", has done nothing exploit renewable energy to weaken her addiction to oil. Italy may well be the miners' canary of peak oil."

I suspect that honor may well go to Spain. (Unless you are just dismissing Spain from the industrialized countries from not being a member of G-7). That's because Spain's current account deficit is 9.2% of GDP while Italy's is only 2.5%. To make the comparison more meaningful some qualitative data is needed, specifically what percentage of food and energy consumption is imported by each country.

Italy for sure is in worse shape in the fiscal front (2.6% of GDP of budget deficit vs 0 in Spain, and also much higher public debt/GDP). Still, it shouldn't matter much if the debt is mostly held by locals, i.e. if they owe it to themselves. Interestingly, Spain had a budget surplus of 1.8% last December, while Italy's deficit has held constant since then.

And while in Club Med, Greece and Portugal have the dubious honor of combining the worst features of the aforementioned countries (12% & 8% CA deficit, 2.5% budget deficit).