In email correspondence seen by Retraction Watch and a follow-up Zoom call, Heshmati told the student he had used Excel’s autofill function to mend the data. […] in several instances where there were no observations to use for the autofill operation, the professor had taken the values from an adjacent country in the spreadsheet. New Zealand’s data had been copied from the Netherlands, for example, and the United States’ data from the United Kingdom.

The waste is a feature; it's how the line goes up.