ISO country codes for USITC DataWeb output

The US International Trade Commission’s Interactive Tariff and Trade DataWeb provides detailed data describing aggregate trade flows between the United States and other economies. It reports country names without reporting a country code. Many data sources (e.g. the IMF’s World Economic Outlook database) report both a country name and a standardized ISO three-letter country code. Due to the use of unofficial names (Burma vs Myanmar, East Timor vs Timor-Leste, etc) and incon- sistent formatting (“Grenada Island” vs “Grenada”, “Saint” vs “St” vs “St.”, etc), merging using country names rather than standardized country codes is unreliable.
I’m making available a correspondence between USITC DataWeb country names and ISO country codes that I built in the course of my research. You can download it as a tab-delimited text file and a Stata data file from my website. The (very brief) documentation is here.

The US International Trade Commission’s Interactive Tariff and Trade DataWeb provides detailed data describing aggregate trade flows between the United States and other economies. It reports country names without reporting a country code. Many data sources (e.g. the IMF’s World Economic Outlook database) report both a country name and a standardized ISO three-letter country code. Due to the use of unofficial names (Burma vs Myanmar, East Timor vs Timor-Leste, etc) and inconsistent formatting (“Grenada Island” vs “Grenada”, “Saint” vs “St” vs “St.”, etc), merging using country names rather than standardized country codes is unreliable.

I’m making available a correspondence between USITC DataWeb country names and ISO country codes that I built in the course of my research. You can download it as a tab-delimited text file and a Stata data file from my website. The (very brief) documentation is here.

2 thoughts on “ISO country codes for USITC DataWeb output”

  2. jdingel

    Pierre-Louis,
    The kountry command is pretty good, but it doesn’t quite handle all the USITC-formatted names. There are about 20 names it doesn’t convert, including the Republic of Congo, East Timor, Equitorial Guinea, and the United Arab Emirates.

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