ISO 3166 is a three-part standard for encoding the names
of countries, dependent territories, and special areas of
geographical interest and their principal subdivisions (e.g.,
provinces or states). It began in 1974 and has been updated
on a regular basis as countries change names, disappear, or
are reabsorbed into other nations.
10.1. ISO 3166-1
Part one of the standard is a set of codes: a two-letter alpha
code, a three-letter alpha code, and a three digit code. The
two-letter alpha code is the most important. It is embedded
in lots of other standards and we computer geeks know it
has the Internet’s country code for top-level domains.
Except for the numeric codes, ISO 3166 codes have been
adopted in the United States as FIPS 104-1. But there is also
an old Federal Information Processing Standard, FIPS 10. It is
also a two-letter code, but it does not match the ISO 3166 in
many places. It has either a different abbreviation code or a
different political division. Beware of it for historical reasons.
10.2. ISO 3166-2
ISO 3166-2 goes down to the principal subdivisions (e.g.,
provinces or states) within a country as encoded by the twoletter
ISO 3166-1 with a separator followed by up to three
more characters. It was fi rst published in 1998.
ISO-3166 and Other Country Codes
Chapter10
©2010, Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Doi: 10.1016/B978-0-12-374722-8.00010-4
124 PART 2 A Sampling of Standards
The problem is that multinational statistical agencies like to
divide the world up differently. There is the “ Nomenclature of
Territorial Units for Statistics ” (NUTS) standard developed
by the European Union ( http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/
ramon/nuts/codelist_en.cfm?list efta ).
The United Nations also a hierarchical three-digit numeric
scheme that starts at the continental level, then goes to
regions within continents, and fi nally resolves to countries
( http://unstats.un.org/unsd/methods/m49/m49regin.htm ).
STANAG 1059 is the version of ISO 3166 used by the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
10.3. ISO 3166-3
These are the codes for formerly used names of countries.
Each former country name in has a four-letter alphabetic
code. The fi rst two letters are the ISO 3166-1 two-letter code
of the former country, while the last two letters tell us why
the name disappeared or changed.
If the country changed its name, the new ISO 3166-1 two-letter
code is used (e.g., Burma changed its name to Myanmar, whose
new two-letter code is MM), or the special code AA is used if its
two-letter code is not changed (e.g., Byelorussian SSR changed
its name to Belarus, which has kept the same two-letter code).
If the country merged into an existing country, the ISO 3166-1
two-letter code of this country is used (e.g., the German
Democratic Republic merged into Germany, whose two-
letter code is DE).
If the country split into several parts, the special code HH
is used to indicate that there is no single successor country
(e.g., Czechoslovakia split into the Czech Republic and
Slovakia), with the exception of Serbia and Montenegro, for
which XX is used to avoid confusion.
The old name also carries the time period when it was valid
as part of the standard, so you can use historical data.