Country Codes (ISO)

CIESIN uses the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) three-letter country codes (version 10) as identifers for national data. To aid those who wish to link national level data to CIESIN's data, CIESIN has created a table that includes the two- and three-letter ISO country codes, US government FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standards) codes, and the United Nations Statistical Division codes, along with country names (in English).

We have created a separate table that includes multiple variants of country names (in English) and ISO three-letter country codes. This table can help when you have a tabular data set with only country names that you want to combine with a data set that may use another variation of country names. Using this file you can match country names to ISO three-letter codes, and then use the ISO three-letter codes to combine the two tabular data set with other data sets. It helps to use a software package such as SPSS for the matching (in SPSS, go to Data -> Merge Files -> Add Variables and merge on "Country,"making sure that you have sorted both files alphabetically by country name, that the fields have identifical names, and the field widths are identical).