Country name: This entry includes all forms of the country's name approved by the US Board on Geographic Names (Italy is used as an example): conventional long form (Italian Republic), conventional short form (Italy), local long form (Repubblica Italiana), local short form (Italia), former (Kingdom of Italy), as well as the abbreviation. See the Terminology note regarding the use of the term "country."
Currency: This entry identifies the local medium of exchange and its basic subunit.
Current issues: This entry briefly characterizes major geographic, social, political, and military developments in the past 12 months and may include a statement about one or two key future trends. This entry appears for only a few countries at the present time, but will be added to all countries in the future.
Data code: This entry gives the official US Government digraph that precisely identifies every land entity without overlap, duplication, or omission. AF, for example, is the data code for Afghanistan. This two-letter country code is a standardized geopolitical data element promulgated in the Federal Information Processing Standards Publication (FIPS) 10-4 by the National Institute of Standards and Technology at the US Department of Commerce and maintained by the Office of the Geographer and Global Issues at the US Department of State. The data code is used to eliminate confusion and incompatibility in the collection, processing, and dissemination of area-specific data and is particularly useful for interchanging data between databases. Appendix F cross-references various country codes and Appendix G does the same thing for hydrographic codes. Data codes-country: This information is presented in Appendix F: Cross-Reference List of Country Data Codes which includes the US Government approved Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS), the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), and Internet country codes.
Data codes—hydrographic: This information is presented in Appendix G:
Cross-Reference List of Hydrographic Data Codes which includes the
International Hydrographic Organization (IHO), Aeronautical Chart and
Information Center (ACIC; now National Imagery and Mapping Agency or
NIMA), and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) hydrographic codes. The
US Government has not yet approved a standard for hydrographic data
codes similar to the FIPS 10-4 standard for country data codes.
Dates of information: The information cutoff date was 1 January 1997, although a few important changes after that date have been included. Most demographic statistics are estimates for 1997.
Death rate: This entry gives the average annual number of deaths during a year per 1,000 population at midyear; also known as crude death rate. The death rate, while only a rough indicator of the mortality situation in a country, accurately indicates the current mortality impact on population growth. This indicator is significantly affected by the age distribution, and most countries will eventually show a rise in the rate, in spite of continued declines in mortality at all ages, as declining fertility results in an aging population.
Debt—external: This entry gives the total amount of public foreign financial obligations.
Dependency status: This entry describes the formal relationship between a nonindependent entity and a sovereign nation.
Dependent areas: This entry contains an alphabetical listing of all nonindependent entities associated in some way with a particular sovereign nation.