Country Converter update 0.7.1

A new major release for the country converter coco.

Why we need a conversion tool

To date, there is no single standard of how to name or specify individual countries in a (meta) data description. While some data sources follow ISO 3166, this standard defines a two and a three letter code in addition to a numerical classification. To further complicate the matter, instead of using one of the existing standards, many databases use unstandardised country names to classify countries.

New classifications

For the new release I extended the list of classifications by the ones used by the Integrated Assessment Models IMAGE and REMIND . Thus currently the following classifications are available

  1. ISO2 (ISO 3166-1 alpha-2)

  2. ISO3 (ISO 3166-1 alpha-3)

  3. ISO - numeric (ISO 3166-1 numeric)

  4. UN numeric code (M.49 - follows to a large extend ISO-numeric)

  5. A standard or short name

  6. The "official" name

  7. Continent

  8. UN region

  9. EXIOBASE 1 classification

  10. EXIOBASE 2 classification

  11. EXIOBASE 3 classification

  12. WIOD classification

  13. Eora

  14. OECD membership (per year)

  15. MESSAGE 11-region classification

  16. IMAGE

  17. REMIND

  18. UN membership (per year)

  19. EU membership (including EU12, EU15, EU25, EU27, EU27_2007, EU28)

  20. EEA membership

  21. Schengen region

  22. Cecilia 2050 classification

  23. APEC

  24. BRIC

  25. BASIC

  26. CIS (as by 2019, excl. Turkmenistan)

  27. G7

  28. G20 (listing all EU member states as individual members)

Brexit

Brexit complicates the handling of the EU membership data. Previously, it was enough to just save the data when the membership started, while now there is a start and exit data. For now, this is solved by adding multiple EU classifications corresponding to various extensions (and now contraction cycles). This follows the nomenclature described in the Eurostat glossary,

Availability

The country converter is now also available from the conda forge and can be installed using conda with (if you don't have the conda_forge channel added to your conda config add "-c conda-forge", see the install instructions here):

conda install country_converter

Of course, it is also still on PyPI. From the command line:

pip install country_converter --upgrade

Thats all folks, happy converting!