Frequently requested features

[vincentarelbundock]

Support for regions, subnational entities, and other non-countries.

• The codelist already includes many regional groupings (e.g., UN and World Bank regions, various continent designations, etc.)
• Since the number of potential groupings is infinite, and since there is no standardization, we cannot support all possible region designations.
• The best approach is to use the custom_dict argument.
• If you would like to submit a CSV file with different groupings, please open a new issue and we can discuss if it makes sense to distribute it in the countrycode package.

Many-to-One mapping

Some countries have multiple codes. For example, in cowc, Germany could be 255 or 260, depending on the time period we are looking at. Currently, countrycode works with a strict one-to-one mapping of codes to countries. Therefore, countrycode() can only recognize one of the codes -- typically the latest one.

The recommended approach is to use the countrycode_panel and to "left-merge" your country-year data directly there.

The countrycode maintainers are interested in implementing a more robust infrastructure for many-to-one mapping. If you have ideas for implementation and/or energy to submit code, please contribute to this thread: #186