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Country Names -- One of the very frustrating problems in dealing with data bases from different sources is linking the data by country name. Each organization has its own special spellings and in some cases the spellings differ from table to table from the same source. This means that users must often create their own tables to match country names from each of the sources they are using.  Fortunately there is a spelling and a set of two character identification codes recognized internationally and provided by the International Standards Organization (ISO). The data base of country names and two character codes can be downloaded from the ISO . The ISO provides country lists in both English and French, but both lists use the same two character code for the country.

To show the lack of uniformity of spellings we have compared the country name spellings in some of the more prominent multi-sectoral data bases with the ISO standard. The data bases used include the World Development Indicators (WDI) provided by the World Bank, the Population Information (POPIN) data base of the United Nations, the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) from the UN, the Human Development Indicators (HDI) provided by the United Nations Development Programme and population data provided by the US Census Bureau. 

The table below shows the data bases and the countries for which there is a spelling discrepancy (marked ##### ) between the data base and the ISO standard short spelling. There are 31 spelling differences in the WDI data base, 11 in HDI, 22 in POPIN, 7 in MDG and 22 in the Census data base.  Coordinating the spellings between all of the data bases is probably not practical, however if the various providers included the ISO two character code in each of their data bases, then it would be possible to link data from various data bases with much less difficulty.