Countries and Areas of Interest for Social Statistics – SCCAI 2009

Introduction to the classification

The variant Countries and Areas of Interest for Social Statistics – SCCAI 2009 was developed to create groupings of countries to enable the production of integrated statistics when publishing social statistics data.

The variant Countries and Areas of Interest for Social Statistics has three levels: 6 geographical macro-regions, 19 geographical sub-regions and 247 countries or areas of interest. This variant is defined in terms of countries or areas of interest in the Standard Classification of Countries and Areas of Interest (SCCAI) 2009. The hierarchical structure of the classification shows the relationship between the three levels of the classification variant.

This variant has a coding structure built on the United Nations numeric codes (NUM-3) for countries or areas. These three-digit codes are preceded by two numeric digits where the first digit represents the macro-regions and the second digit identifies the sub-regions within the macro-region; together these five-digit codes form the SCCAI code.

These groupings are based on those used historically for Statistics Canada's Census of Population, place of birth variable.

Relation to previous standard

This is a revision of the previous standard List of Countries, Dependencies and Other Areas of Interest. The current standard, like the previous standard, is also based on the International Standard for country codes ISO 3166-1:2006^{Footnote 1}, but the current standard has been modified for consistency with Canadian norms. This standard includes a classification variant Countries and Areas of Interest for Social Statistics – SCCAI 2009 that provides standard groupings of countries and associated codes for publication purposes. New usage notes are included with the standard.

Conformity to relevant internationally recognized standards

This standard is compatible with the composition of geographical macro-regions and geographical sub-regions of the United Nations Statistics Division^{Footnote 2}; however, some differences remain. The main differences are:

• In this standard, Bermuda is included within the sub-region Caribbean and Bermuda while it is part of Northern America in the United Nations groupings;
• The macro-region Oceania is not further divided into sub-regions in SCCAI;
• The West Central Asia and the Middle East is one sub-region in SCCAI while most of the countries found here are in two sub-regions: Central Asia, and Western Asia in the United Nations groupings;
• The former Soviet Baltic republics are included with Eastern Europe in SCCAI while they are part of Northern Europe within the United Nations groupings;
• Finally, some French sub-region names used by the United Nations have been modified in the SCCAI to make them simpler and more consistent with Canadian convention.