Sources and method

Which countries?

The site follows the United Nations list: the 193 member states and the 2 non-member observer states, the Holy See (Vatican) and the State of Palestine, making 195 countries.

Territories that are not member states appear in grey on the maps, without a fact file: Greenland, Western Sahara (a non-self-governing territory according to the UN), Kosovo, Taiwan, and overseas territories and dependencies.

Borders

Maps are drawn from Natural Earth (public domain) at 1:10,000,000, then simplified. Where borders are disputed, the site follows the UN position: Crimea is part of Ukraine, the Golan Heights part of Syria, Western Sahara is separate from Morocco, northern Cyprus is part of Cyprus and Somaliland part of Somalia.

The world map uses the Equal Earth projection, which preserves areas: Greenland does not look bigger than Africa.

Population and economy

Population, GDP per capita, life expectancy and urban population share come from the World Bank (CC BY 4.0 licence), using the latest year published for each country. The year is shown next to each figure. The Vatican is not covered by the World Bank: its population is a rounded estimate.

Names, capitals, languages and currencies

Codes, languages, currencies, neighbours and areas come from the mledoze/countries project (ODbL licence). English country, language and currency names follow the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR). Capitals were checked by hand for countries that have several; each special case is explained on the country page.

Flags

Flags come from the country-flags collection (public domain), in their official proportions. Flag colours are measured automatically on each flag’s official design.

Spotted a mistake?

The data is updated every year. If you spot an error, let us know and it will be fixed.