North America

North America, for exam purposes, is usually treated as spanning the US, Canada, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean island states — 23 UN-member countries in total. Three of these — Canada, Mexico, and the United States — are G20 members, and Canada and the United States are also G7 members; no North American country beyond these three carries membership in either bloc, making this continent's higher-bloc representation the most concentrated (three countries out of 23) of any continent in this book.

North America — Capitals and Currencies

The Eastern Caribbean Dollar Bloc

Six independent countries — Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines — plus two non-independent territories (Anguilla and Montserrat) share a single common currency, the East Caribbean Dollar (XCD), issued by the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank and pegged at a fixed rate to the US dollar. This makes it Africa's CFA franc arrangement's closest cousin in the Americas — a shared regional currency spanning multiple fully sovereign states, each of which retains its own government, parliament, and foreign policy while ceding monetary policy to a common regional bank.

Memory hook — "Six small islands, one shared dollar": whenever a question names a small English-speaking eastern Caribbean island nation and asks for its currency, the answer is very likely the East Caribbean Dollar rather than a country-specific one — Jamaica, the Bahamas, Barbados, and Trinidad and Tobago are the notable Caribbean exceptions that each keep their own separate dollar.

North America's only landlocked-relevant fact is that it has no landlocked countries at all — every one of its 23 UN members has a coastline (a useful "which continent has zero landlocked countries" fact, shared only with Oceania and South America). Its island nations dominate the list numerically: of the 23 countries above, thirteen — Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Cuba, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Grenada, Haiti, Jamaica, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and Trinidad and Tobago — are island nations (with Haiti and the Dominican Republic uniquely sharing one island, Hispaniola, between two separate sovereign states), leaving only ten mainland countries: Belize, Canada, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, and the United States.