ation available at
the time of preparation. 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.

Current issues: This entry at the beginning of a country profile
briefly characterizes major geographic, social, political, and
military developments in the past 12 months and may include a
statement about one or two key future trends. This entry appears for
only a few countries at the present time, but may be added to more
countries in the future.

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 codes
and Appendix G does the same thing for hydrographic 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 Gover