This polygon shapefile depicts 247 countries worldwide, distinguishing between metropolitan (homeland) and independent and semi-independent portions of sovereign states. Each country is coded with a world region that roughly follows the United Nations "Composition of macro geographical (continental) regions, geographical sub-regions, and selected economic and other groupings" and includes some thematic data from the United Nations and the United States Central Intelligence Agency. Natural Earth Vector depicts boundaries of countries according to defacto status. These data are represented at 1:50,000,000 scale. This layer is part of the Natural Earth Collection (v.2.0.0).Natural Earth is a public domain map dataset available at 1:10, 1:50 and 1:110 million scales. Featuring tightly integrated vector and raster data, with Natural Earth you can make a variety of visually pleasing, well-crafted maps with cartography or GIS software.