I'm curious why the values aren't identical to within rounding errors for countries like the Netherlands and Belgium which are nearly the same size, in essentially the same location, and don't have different amounts of welfare like north/south Korea or USA/MX.

Can't be that one has tech or purchasing power that the other doesn't, or that food needs to travel a lot further, and I would also not expect vastly different foreign relations (also because EU, but also because the countries are so similar in beliefs and histories).

And similar for slightly different but still nearby and similar countries like Germany, Luxemburg, and the UK. Anyone know what causes these differences?

Edit: to answer your question, I wouldn't look for meaning behind that but rather assume that a limited scope article is a lot easier to write than a broadly scoped one. In the ~global context of HN, the headline then sounds like they're singled out.