Countries and Areas of Interest for Social Statistics - SCCAI 2017 - Introduction

The variant Countries and Areas of Interest for Social Statistics – SCCAI 2017 was developed to create groupings of countries to enable the production of integrated statistics when publishing social statistics data. These groupings are based on those used historically for Statistics Canada's Census of Population place of birth variable.

The variant Countries and Areas of Interest for Social Statistics – SCCAI 2017 has three levels: 6 geographical macro-regions, 19 geographical sub-regions and 251 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) 2017. 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 code (NUM-3) for countries or areas. This three-digit code is preceded by two numeric digits, where the first digit represents the macro-region and the second digit identifies the sub-region within the macro-region. Together, this five-digit code forms the SCCAI code.

Relation to previous version

This is a revision of the previous Standard Classification of Countries and Areas of Interest (SCCAI) 2016. This standard includes a classification variant, Countries and Areas of Interest for Social Statistics – SCCAI 2017, that provides standard groupings of countries and associated codes for publication purposes. 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 DivisionFootnote 1; however, some differences remain. The main differences are:

  • in this standard, Bermuda is included within the sub-region Caribbean and Bermuda, whereas it is part of Northern America in the United Nations groupings
  • the macro-region Oceania is not further divided into sub-regions in SCCAI
  • 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
  • Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are included within the sub-region of Eastern Europe in SCCAI, whereas they are part of Northern Europe in the United Nations groupings
  • some French sub-region names used by the United Nations have been modified in SCCAI to make them simpler and more consistent with Canadian convention.
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