UN M.49

UN M.49 is a standard for area codes used by the United Nations for statistical purposes, developed and maintained by the United Nations Statistics Division. Each area code is a 3-digit number which can refer to a wide variety of geographical, political, or economic regions, like a continent, a country, or a specific group of developed or developing countries. Codes assigned in the system generally do not change when the country or area's name changes (unlike ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 or ISO 3166-1 alpha-3), but instead change when the territorial extent of the country or area changes significantly, although there have been exceptions to this rule.

Some of these codes, those representing countries and territories, were first included as part of the ISO 3166-1 standard in its second edition in 1981, but they have been released by the United Nations Statistics Division since 1970.

Another part of these numeric codes, those representing geographical (continental and sub-continental) supranational regions, was also included in the IANA registry for region subtags (first described in September 2006 in the now obsoleted RFC 4646, but confirmed in its successor RFC 5646, published in September 2009) for use within language tags, as specified in IETF's BCP 47 (where the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes are used as region subtags, instead of UN M.49 codes, for countries and territories).

Code lists

M.49 area codes (as of 15 April 2009)

Geographical supranational regions (See also BCP 47 where these were imported as region subtags) Code Area 001 World 002 Africa 015 Northern Africa   Sub-Saharan Africa 014 Eastern Africa 017 Middle Africa 018 Southern Africa 011 Western Africa 019 Americas 419 Latin America and the Caribbean 029 Caribbean 013 Central America 005 South America 003 North America (includes 021,029,013) 021 Northern America 142 Asia 143 Central Asia 030 Eastern Asia 034 Southern Asia 035 South-Eastern Asia 145 Western Asia 150 Europe 151 Eastern Europe 154 Northern Europe 039 Southern Europe 155 Western Europe 009 Oceania 053 Australia and New Zealand 054 Melanesia 057 Micronesia 061 Polynesia

Examples of geopolitical entities (countries or territories) (See also ISO 3166-1 numeric for the complete set) Code Area 024 Angola 591 Panama 496 Mongolia 554 New Zealand 756 Switzerland 830 Channel Islands Examples of economic regions (defined for statistical use only) Code Area   Developed and developing regions   Developed regions 021 Northern America 150 Europe 392 Japan 053 Australia and New Zealand 376 Israel   Southern African Customs Union   Developing regions 002 Africa (sometimes excluding the Southern African Customs Union) 019* Americas (* excluding Northern America, numerical code 021) 029 Caribbean 013 Central America 005 South America 142* Asia (* excluding Japan, numerical code 392, and sometimes also Israel, numerical code 376) 009* Oceania (* excluding Australia and New Zealand, numerical code 053) 778 Transition countries 172 Commonwealth of Independent States   Transition countries of South-Eastern Europe   Developing countries 432 Landlocked developing countries 722 Small island developing states 199 Least developed countries

Private-use codes and reserved codes

Beside the codes standardized above, the numeric codes 900 to 999 are reserved for private-use in ISO 3166-1 (under agreement by the UNSD) and in the UN M.49 standard. They may be used for any other groupings or subdivision of countries, territories and regions.

Some of these private-use codes may be found in some UN statistics reports and databases, for their own specific purpose. They are not portable across databases from third parties (except through private agreement), and may be changed without notice.

Note that the code 000 is reserved and not used for defining any region. It is used in absence of data, or for data in which no region (not even the World as a whole) is applicable. For unknown or unencoded regions, private-use codes should preferably be used.

Extensions to M.49

Early editions of M.49 used one- or two-digit prefixes to designate economic regions rather than assigning 3-digit codes. These two digit prefixes were designed to be used to easily aggregate data through the use of prefix matching, and regions could be specified collectively by using the 000 code as a base to which the prefix would be added. For example, by prefixing 13 to Algeria's code, 012, to create the five-digit code 13012, Algeria could be identified as being in North Africa (13000), which is itself in Africa (10000).

One-digit suffixes were also permitted, to specify statistics of subdivisions of countries. For example, by suffixing 5 to the code for the United Kingdom to create the four-digit code 8265, Scotland could be represented as a subdivision of the United Kingdom. Additional suffixes could be used to represent the other constituent countries of Great Britain.

Codes no longer in use (obsoleted since 1982)

Old Code	Old Area	New Code(s)
200	Czechoslovakia	203, 703
720	Democratic Yemen	887
230	Ethiopia	231, 232
280	Federal Republic of Germany	276
278	German Democratic Republic	276
530	Netherlands Antilles	531, 534, 535
532	Netherlands Antilles	530, 533
582	Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands	580, 583, 584, 585
891	Serbia and Montenegro	499, 688
890	Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia	070, 191, 705, 807, 891
062	South-Central Asia	034, 143
810	Union of Soviet Socialist Republics	031, 051, 112, 233, 268, 398, 417, 428, 440, 498, 762, 795, 804, 860
886	Yemen	887

See also

• ISO 3166-1 numeric
• Geocoding

External links

• Standard country or area codes and geographical regions for statistical use