GISCO - Administrative units 2020 at country level (COUNTRIES 2020), Feb. 2020

This dataset contains administrative boundaries at country level. This dataset contains 2 feature classes (regions and boundaries) per scale level and there are 6 different scale levels (100K, 1M, 3M, 10M, 20M and 60M). In addition to those 12 feature classes, there is an additional scale-independent feature class for the labels. This dataset has been extracted from the GISCO database [CNTR_2020] maintained by Eurostat (European Commission). The extent of the feature classes covers the entire world. The countries dataset is used mainly for mapping purposes. This dataset is created by aligning the EBM 2020 dataset (Reference date 31.12.2018) of EuroGeographics (for EuroGeographics members), with the GISCO 2016 country data. All countries that are fully available in EBM (EU, EFTA, Cooperating Countries, Andorra, Belarus, Greenland, Moldova, Georgia and Ukraine) are used as the master dataset whose boundaries are not amended. The dataset is available for public use at 1M, 3M, 10M, 20M, 60M, while the full dataset at 100K is restricted. The public dataset for 2020 will be soon available for download on https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/gisco/geodata/reference-data/administrative-units-statistical-units/countries. IMPORTANT NOTE: This metadata shall only be used internally by the EEA. This metadata has been slightly adapted from the original metadata information provided by Eurostat (European Commission) and is to be used only for internal EEA purposes. For reference, the original metadata information provided by ESTAT (COUNTRIES_2020.xml) is provided together with the dataset as well as a copy from the information available on this dataset on the GISCO wiki (CNTR2020_GISCOWiki.pdf extracted on 23.04.2020).