Indicators for global socio-economic development and the structure and functioning of the Earth system

Country Groupings for splits
OECD members are here defined as countries that were members in 2010. Their membership status in that year was applied to the whole data set, which in some
cases goes as far back as 1750. The so-called BRICS countries consist of Brazil, Russia, India, China (incl Macau, Hongkong and Macau where applicable) as well as
South Africa and, similar to the OECD definition, we kept this grouping for the entire data set.
All countries that were part of neither of the above groups were subsequently grouped together to form the “rest”.

Some data sets contained also data for USSR, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia.
If the data set also contained data for the previous member countries as well as the conglomerate, i.e. data for Czech Republic and Slovakia, as well as Czechoslovakia,
we compared the sum of the separate countries to the conglomerate. If the sum of the data for the separate countries was larger or equal to the conglomerate figure,
we included the separate countries in appropriate group and omitted any data for the conglomerate.

If there was no overlap, i.e. presence of data for Czechoslovakia, but none for Czech Republic and Slovakia, we included Czechoslovakia under OECD as, geographically,
this area would become part of the association in form of two separate countries later on.
In the case of USSR and Yugoslavia, the majority of the emerging countries were not OECD or BRICS members at 2010 and data for those conglomerates were placed under “rest”.