tion. Names
and/or boundaries may have changed subsequently.

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. Also see
the Terminology note.

Currency: This entry identifies the national medium of
exchange and its basic subunit.

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 data codes and Appendix G
does the same thing for hydrographic data 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) codes, the International
Organization for Standardization (ISO) codes, and Internet
codes for land entities.

Data codes--hydrographic: This information is presented in
Appendix G: Cross-Reference List of Hydrographic Data Codes
which includes the International Hydrographic Organization
(IHO) codes, Aeronautical Chart and Information Center
(ACIC; now National Imagery and Mapping Agency or NIMA)
codes, and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) codes for
hydrographic entities. The US Government has not yet
approved a standard for hydrographic data codes similar to
the FIPS 10-4 standard for country data codes.

Date of information: In general, information available as of
1 January 1999, was used in the preparation of this edition.

Death rate: This entry gives the average annual number of
deaths during a year per 1,000 population at midyear; also
known a