kountry: A Stata Utility for Merging Cross-country Data from Multiple Sources

Abstract

This article describes kountry, a data-management command that can be used to translate one country-coding scheme into another, to recode country names into a “standardized form”, and to generate geographic-region variables. Users can build a custom dictionary through a helper command, kountryadd, that “teaches” kountry new name variations. The dictionary can be protected from an accidental overwriting through two helper commands: kountrybackup and kountryrestore.