Does Panama really import 3.46 barrels of LPG per person annually from the US? Sounds like nonsense, according to this blog.
Seems as though the propane is actually sitting on ships transiting the canal or being used as storage temporarily, and some of the cargo is being traded while it sits there. Most of it is probably going to Asia.
So we see an error introduced by a quirk in the big data being used to report.
however, it seems like any scrutiny of the data, such as regressing consumption on population, would have produced an outlier in Panama, and we would of necessity have to study the specifics of that data [point to include it or decipher what’s going on.