I may be late to the ball on this one, but in discussing a project that we're working on, fellow QP blogger Michael Allen recently pointed me to the "kountry" package for STATA. The package was created by Rafal Raciborski for the purposes of facilitating the creation of country codes and switching between codes provided by different sources (e.g. COW, IMF, etc.). The cite for the STATA Journal piece corresponding to the package is below:
Raciborski, R. 2008. kountry: A Stata utility for merging cross-country data from
multiple sources. Stata Journal 8: 390-400
Anyone that has worked with country codes knows that this can be a pretty big pain. I've used it once so far, but it seems to work pretty well. Others may have been aware of this before now and might be aware of any bugs, problems, etc. If so, please add to the comments section any notes that you might want to make on the matter.
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On another note, I just wanted to reiterate the earlier message that posting will continue to be sparse for a while longer. While we would all very much like to be blogging more regularly—especially in light of the recent debates, and the final upcoming foreign policy debate—everyone is currently engaged with other professional responsibilities. I believe this will prove to be time is well-spent, though, as everyone seems to be keeping busy and is pretty productive.
I used kountry a couple weeks ago and am thrilled about it. It will definitely save hours of meaningless recoding.
Oh, and JSYK, it's Stata, not "STATA": http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/resources/statalist-faq/#spell
Posted by: jwell33 | October 21, 2012 at 11:41 AM