teref

This package provides reference tables, such as showing the correspondence between country and city names and codes across different databases and sources. This package contains three reference tables:

• cb_ctry: Country names and codes across databases.
• cb_city: City names and codes across databases.
• cb_ctry_oegct: Country names, codes and regions used in the Global City Travel database.
• cb_regions_oegts: Region names and codes used in the Global Travel Service database.
• cb_var_oegc: Variable codes and descriptions to use with the Global Cities database.
• cb_var_oegct: Variable codes and descriptions to use with the Global City Travel database.
• cb_var_oegts_cmetric: Variable codes and descriptions to use with the country metric variables in the Global Travel Service database.

Installation

You can install the package from GitHub with:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("TourismEconomics/teref")

Organization

The tables, or code books, are stored as Rdata files in the “data” directory.

Suggestions

When using the cb_ctry or the cb_city with the Global Cities database, it is advisable to join based on the oegc_loc_code, rather than the location name, because some city-country situations have the same location name (e.g. Singapore, Luxembourg, Hong Kong, Macao).

Background

CBSA and County File Preparation

Background notes on the approach to prepare the CBSA and county file.

Terms

• Core Based Statistical Areas (CBSAs): Refer collectively to metropolitan statistical areas and micropolitan statistical areas. CBSAs consist of a county or counties (or equivalent entities).

• Combined Statistical Area: Consists of two or more adjacent core based statistical areas (CBSAs) that have an employment interchange measure of 15 or more.

• Metropolitan Division: A county or group of counties (or equivalent entities) delineated within a larger metropolitan statistical area.

• Metropolitan Statistical Area: A geographic entity delineated by the Office of Management and Budget for use by federal statistical agencies (at least one urbanized area of 50,000 population).

• Micropolitan Statistical Area: A geographic entity delineated by the Office of Management and Budget for use by federal statistical agencies (at least one urbanized area of 10,000 population, but less than 50,000).

Codes

geoids

Census Bureau uses geographic identifiers (geoids). Census provides a description here.

Based on this page, we have the following description.

• A single code — the geoID — identifies every geographic entity in census data products. The geoID (sometimes called geocode, areaID, etc.) may be up to 40 characters long. Longer codes usually represent smaller entities. GeoIDs have a specific format for all areas:

  • Characters 1-3: summary level (see below)

  • Characters 4-5: geographic component (allows division of a geographic unit by certain tests, such as rural/urban)

  • Characters 6-7: always “US”

  • The remaining characters provide a unique identifier within the specified summary level. For states and smaller entities, the first two characters are the state’s code.

• For example: Columbia, Missouri’s geoID is 16000US2915670, which can be interpreted as:

  • Summary level: 160 (place)

  • Geographic component: 00 (i.e., total)

  • State: 29 (Missouri)

  • Place code: 15670 (Columbia)

ANSI / FIPS

The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) is the sole U.S. representative and dues-paying member of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

American National Standards Institute codes (ANSI codes) are standardized numeric or alphabetic codes issued by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) to ensure uniform identification of geographic entities through all federal government agencies. The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) has taken over the management of geographic codes from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Under NIST, the codes adhered to the Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS). ANSI now issues two types of codes. They continue to issue the commonly used FIPS codes, although the acronym has now changed to Federal Information Processing Series, because it is no longer considered the standard.

Source references

Delineation files that define CBSAs and metro divisions

Census Bureau provides delineation files here. The March 2020 version of the “Core based statistical areas (CBSAs), metropolitan divisions, and combined statistical areas (CSAs)” file was downloaded to use for definitions of CBSA. (list1_2020.csv)

Gazetteer files that provide codes for CBSAs and counties

Downloads from this page, and file record layouts from this page. The 2020 versions of the following files were used:

• Core Based Statistical Areas (2020_Gaz_cbsa_national.txt)

• Counties (2020_Gaz_counties_national.txt)

Tidycensus package

Downloaded the fips_codes data frame from the Tidycensus package (fips_codes_tidycensus_2021-03).