United Nations statistical divisions

The United Nations geoscheme is a system which divides the countries of the world into regional and subregional groups. It was devised by the United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD) based on the M49 coding classification.

The creators note that "the assignment of countries or areas to specific groupings is for statistical convenience and does not imply any assumption regarding political or other affiliation of countries or territories".

The UNSD geoscheme does not set a standard for the entire United Nations System, and it often differs from geographic definitions used by the autonomous United Nations specialized agencies for their own organizational convenience. For instance, UNSD includes Georgia and Cyprus in Western Asia, yet the United Nations Industrial Development Organization and UNESCO include them in Europe.

The schema was created for statistical analysis and consists of macro-geographical regions arranged to the extent possible according to continents. Within these groupings, smaller, geographical subregions and selected economic and other groupings allow for detailed analysis.

Other alternative groupings include the World Bank regional classification,CIA World Factbook regions and Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers Geographic Regions.

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