The Country Similarity Index attempts to quantify how similar countries are to each other relative to other countries. The index is a statistically-based way to measure this. It weighs equally five major aspects of countries: their demographics, culture, politics, infrastructure, and geography. The methodology is exactly the same for each country.
The data from the Country Similarity Index was used to cluster countries into different regions. Some unique countries, like Bhutan, North Korea, and Israel, are very difficult to group with other countries. Therefore, it was necessary to make the largest regions still have a great deal of variation within them. This resulted in 9 distinct macro-regions:
- The North & Australasia
- Central & South America
- Middle East & North Africa
- Sub-Saharan Africa
- Central Asia
- South Asia
- East Asia
- Southeast Asia
- South Pacific
However, these macro-regions still have very significant differences within them. Countries as different as Mongolia and Turkey are still grouped together. To account for this, the 9 macro-regions were further divided into 27 sub-regions. Some individual countries are their own “region” because they have many traits that make them especially unique.
Most countries neatly fit into one of these regions. However, there are a few countries that could be categorized into two different sub-regions. The countries that have characteristics of two different regions, like Zimbabwe, are shaded with the colors of both regions. The countries in each region and their individual pages are as follows:
The North & Australasia
The Anglo World (1-A)
United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain, Ireland
The European Region (1-B)
Poland, Czechia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Serbia, Slovakia, Croatia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, North Macedonia, Slovenia, Montenegro, Germany, France, Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Cyprus, Iceland, Romania, Moldova, Albania
The North Eurasia Region (1-C)
Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, Armenia
Central & South America
The Caribbean Region (2-A)
Jamaica, Trinidad & Tobago, Bahamas, Guyana, Suriname, Belize
The Latin American Region (2-B)
Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, Guatemala, Ecuador, Dominican Rep., Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Panama, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Bolivia, Paraguay, Cuba, Brazil
Cape Verde (2-C)
Mauritius (2-D)
Middle East & North Africa
The Arab World (3-A)
Saudi Arabia, U.A.E., Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Libya, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Lebanon, Yemen
Israel (3-B)
The Nastaliq Region (3-C)
Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan
Sub-Saharan Africa
The Sahel Region (4-A)
Niger, Mali, Chad, Somalia, Djibouti, Sudan, Mauritania
The Tropical Africa Region (4-B)
Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Guinea, Benin, Togo, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Burundi, D.R. Congo, Cameroon, Central African Rep., Rep. Congo, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Mozambique, Angola, Madagascar, South Sudan
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The Southern Africa Region (4-C)
South Africa, Lesotho, Namibia, Botswana, Eswatini
The Ethiopic Africa Region (4-D)
Ethiopia, Eritrea
South Asia
The Hindu World (5-A)
India, Nepal
Bhutan (5-B)
Bangladesh (5-C)
Sri Lanka (5-D)
Central Asia
The Central Asian Region (6-A)
Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Turkey , Azerbaijan, Tajikistan
Mongolia (6-B)
East Asia
The Chinese Region (7-A)
China, Taiwan
The North Pacific Region (7-B)
Japan, South Korea
North Korea (7-C)
Southeast Asia
The Mainland Southeast Asia Region (8-A)
Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam
Singapore (8-B)
The Southeast Asia Island Region (8-C)
Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, Philippines
South Pacific
The South Pacific Region (9-A)
Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Fiji, Samoa
East Timor (9-B)
Hello, when I click on the link to the food regions of the world, I get redirected to this page. Is the map of the food regions still on this site ? Thanks
which link are you referring too? thanks
For example this page
https://objectivelists.com/2023/12/09/the-east-africa-food-region/
I click on “23 world food sub-regions” and I end up here, which is not food. It is the same on all pages about “the X food region”. So maybe the link is wrong.
But, I found the food regions map page through the site front page, i don’t know why I was not seeing it. Thanks and also I love your work.
thanks so much! the links have now been updated
This site is extraordinary, but particularly this map. I am currently travelling long term and wish I had this when leaving. I had figured a lot of it out, and it’s fascinating to see that so much of it is borne out by your data, and i got some things wrong. E.g. I had thought Nepal was going to be much more distinct, but it’s far more like India than I’d realised.
What did you do to create the clusters? Did you use a clustering algorithm or do it by hand?
not by hand, FAR too difficult – used RStudio
What clustering algorithm did you use?
average linkage
I would classify the Southern Cone (Argentina, Uruguay, Chile – aka Temperate Latin America) as a separate sub-region, distinct from the rest of Latin America (which could be called Tropical Latin America). The reasoning for that is that the Southern Cone is more similar to Europe (and North America and Australia/New Zealand) in being in the temperate zone and with its people being mainly of European descent, whereas the rest of Latin America is tropical and its people are of mixed European/indigenous or even purely indigenous descent.
Tropical Latin America could be 2-B, the Southern Cone could be 2-C, Cape Verde could become 2-D, and Mauritius could become 2-E.
It’s not fair that the Southern Cone isn’t its own region apart from the rest of Latin America, while many other distinct parts of the world consisting of only a few countries (e.g. Southern Africa; North Pacific), or even one country (e.g. Israel; Mongolia), are their own region.