Hi everyone,

We now return United Nations (UN) M49 codes as an annotation to our results.

M49 codes are standard codes often used in statistical analysis. A unique three digit code is assigned to each territory. There are also codes for commonly used supranational regions, for example SUB-SAHARAN_AFRICA (202) or LATIN_AMERICA (419), as defined and used by the UN.

We also provide a mapping to the abbreviations of common groupings used in economic analysis:

  • LDC Least Developed Country

  • LEDC Less Economically Developed Country

  • LLDC Landlocked Developing Country

  • MEDC More Economically Developed Country

  • SIDS Small Island Developing State

So for example a geocoding query that results in a location in Bolivia now returns:

        "UN_M49": {
          "regions": {
            "AMERICAS": "019",
            "BO": "068",
            "LATIN_AMERICA": "419",
            "SOUTH_AMERICA": "005",
            "WORLD": "001"
          },
          "statistical_groupings": [
            "LEDC",
            "LLDC"
          ]
        },

We hope this is helpful to our friends in the economic analysis community. The idea behind this annotation came from a request from one of our customers. Many thanks! If you have any suggestions for improving our service, please let us know.

Visit the documentation to learn more about the UN M49 annotation. If this is your cup of tea, you may also be interested in the FIPS code annotation which is often used in analysis of the United States.

As always, annotations can be turned off by using the optional no_annotations=1 parameter, and we recommend you do that if you don’t need the information in the annotations as it means we can respond to your query a tiny bit faster.

Happy geocoding,

Ed

written from

    "annotations" : {
        "UN_M49": {
          "regions": {
            "ES": "724",
            "EUROPE": "150",
            "SOUTHERN_EUROPE": "039",
            "WORLD": "001"
          },
          "statistical_groupings": [
            "MEDC"
          ]
        },

Final thing, I know what you are now saying - “This is wonderful, Ed, but did you deal with the weird edge case of the island of Sark (population < 500) that for some odd reason the UN assigns a unique M49 code to (680), despite not having it’s own ISO 3166 alpha2 code?”. Yes. Yes, we did.