Explanatory notes

Economies, countries and country groups

The classifications of countries in this publication have been adopted solely for the purposes of analytical or statistical convenience and do not necessarily imply any judgement concerning the stage of development of a particular country or area. The term “economies" refers to regions, countries and territories.

 

There is no established convention for the designation of "developed" and "developing" countries or areas in the United Nations system. In common practice, Israel and Japan in Asia, Bermuda, Canada, Greenland, Saint Pierre et Miquelon, and the United States in North America, Australia and New Zealand in Oceania, and Europe are considered "developed" regions or areas. Transition economies refers to South-East Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Developing countries includes all countries or territories not specified above.

 

Country groupings follow generally those employed in UNCTADstat and the UNCTAD Handbook of Statistics 2011 (United Nations publication, sales No. E/F.11.II .D.1) unless otherwise stated.

 

The data for China do not include those for Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (Hong Kong SAR), Macao Special Administrative Region (Macao SAR) and Taiwan Province of China.

 

Explanation of symbols

0 Zero means that the amount is nil or negligible.
_ The symbol underscore indicates that the item is not applicable.
.. Two dots indicate that the data are not available or are not separately reported.
- The use of a hyphen on data area means that data is estimated and included in the aggregation but not to be shown. A hyphen between years (e.g. 1985-1990) signifies the full period involved, including the initial and final years.
The term “billion” signifies 1,000 million.

 

(e) Estimate
(f) Forecast
(p) Provisional data
Some exceptions are indicated in footnotes.

 

Other notes

The term “dollar” ($) refers to United States dollars, unless otherwise stated and data in dollars are expressed in current United States dollars of the year to which they refer.

 

Decimals and percentages do not necessarily add up to totals because of rounding.

 

Average annual growth rates are defined as the coefficient b in the exponential trend function y = ae^bt where t stands for time. This method takes all observations in a period into account. Therefore, the resulting growth rates reflect trends that are not unduly influenced by exceptional values.