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WHO Member States with regional and Pacific classifications

Source: R/data.R
who_countries.Rd

A tibble of the 194 World Health Organization (WHO) Member States, with standard country identifiers and WHO/Pacific groupings used across DSIR analytical workflows.

Usage

who_countries

Format

A tibble with 194 rows and 7 columns:

iso3

ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 code (3-letter, e.g. "PHL").

iso2

ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code (2-letter, e.g. "PH").

m49_code

UN M49 numeric code, stored as a 3-character string with leading zeros where present (e.g. "008" for Albania). Stored as character because some downstream APIs (notably the UN SDG API) expect the leading-zero form.

name_official

WHO official English name (e.g. "Iran (Islamic Republic of)"). Use for formal documents and reports.

name_short

A shorter form suitable for charts and tables (e.g. "Iran"). Equal to name_official for countries whose official name is already concise. See Details.

who_region

WHO region code: one of "AFR", "AMR", "SEAR", "EUR", "EMR", "WPR".

is_pic

Logical. TRUE for the 14 Pacific Island Country (PIC) Member States in WPR, FALSE otherwise.

Source

Details

Scope. WHO has 194 Member States plus 2 Associate Members (Puerto Rico, Tokelau) and reports on additional non-Member areas (e.g. West Bank and Gaza Strip). This dataset includes only the 194 Member States. Cook Islands and Niue are full WHO Member States and are included even though they are not UN member states.

Region coverage (as of May 2025, after WHO EB156 reassignment of Indonesia from SEAR to WPR):

  • AFR (African Region): 47

  • AMR (Region of the Americas): 35

  • SEAR (South-East Asia Region): 10

  • EUR (European Region): 53

  • EMR (Eastern Mediterranean Region): 21

  • WPR (Western Pacific Region): 28

Short names. name_short differs from name_official for 13 countries where the official name is a parenthetical descriptor or is otherwise long. Examples: "DPR Korea", "DR Congo", "Lao PDR", "United Kingdom". These short forms follow conventions used in WHO regional reports and OECD Health at a Glance: Asia/Pacific.

PICs. The Pacific Island Countries flag (is_pic) marks the 14 WHO Member States in the Pacific sub-region: Cook Islands, Fiji, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Micronesia (Federated States of), Nauru, Niue, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu. Non-Member Pacific areas (e.g. New Caledonia, French Polynesia, American Samoa) are not included in this dataset.

Examples

# All WPR Member States, sorted alphabetically by short name
wpr <- who_countries[who_countries$who_region == "WPR", ]
wpr <- wpr[order(wpr$name_short), c("iso3", "name_short")]
head(wpr)
#> # A tibble: 6 × 2
#>   iso3  name_short       
#>   <chr> <chr>            
#> 1 AUS   Australia        
#> 2 BRN   Brunei Darussalam
#> 3 KHM   Cambodia         
#> 4 CHN   China            
#> 5 COK   Cook Islands     
#> 6 FJI   Fiji             

# Filter a data frame to PIC member states
# df_pic <- subset(my_data, country_iso3 %in% who_countries$iso3[who_countries$is_pic])