“…First, the increasing importance of the regional factor at the expense of the country factor in the Mercosur region, which is in line with the development of the trading block. Second, CARICOM tends to have the largest share of variance attributable to the country factor, where this may be due to the fact that the countries within this group are very heterogeneous in terms of population, GDP per capita, development, geography and sectors of productive capacity (Yersh, 2022). For example, in 2018, Haiti is shown to have a GDP per capita of $868.30, while Barbados is reported as $17,949.30 (The World Bank, 2023).…”