Country Concordances

Summary

Country concordance is an important aspect of a data technician's job to maintain the International Futures database. Country concordance refers to the differences between the IFs Country list and another organization's country list and merging them to ensure the IFs country list in IFs system. For example, in some organization "Türkiye" is the name displayed, but for IFs we use the name "Turkey". Therefore IFs data technicians need to change the name to "Turkey" for the system to process it. Below lists the organizations IFs draw their data from and the common changes needed as well as a link to a GitHub repository that contains a country list.

Proxies

Proxies are used when a certain country does not have data points and estimates are needed. Proxies should be used on a case by case basis and for certain series. Proxies essentially use a similar country to the country being approximated (in terms of population, GDP, etc.) and calculates the scale of what the approximated countries value should be.

An example from IHME's series is Kosovo and Albania. Albania is similar and geographically close to Kosovo making it an ideal for a proxy. For a series that deals with death such as SocietalViolenceDeathsTotal use the following equation:

• Kosovo’s number of deaths = Albania’s number of deaths * (Kosovo’s Population / Albania’s Population)

World Bank

Differences

IFs Countries	World Bank Countries

Differences

IFs Countries	IMF Countries

Food Agricultural Organization (FAO)

Differences

IFs Countries	FAO Countries

World Health Organization (WHO)

Differences

IFs Countries	WHO Countries

Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME)

Differences

IFs Countries	IHME Countries