Country of birth

With regard to the coding of countries of birth, the objective was to minimise residual (i.e. "other") categories. An attempt was made to preserve the maximum information available while distinguishing between continental/regional residual categories whenever this was possible (i.e. "Other Africa", "Other Europe", "Other Asia", "Other South and Central America and Caribbean", "Other Oceania", "Other North America").

With regard to split, recomposed or newly constituted countries, there was little choice but to respect the coding in the national data collection, which varies from one country to another. In the United States, for example, people born in Korea have a choice of three ways to indicate their country of birth: Korea, North Korea or South Korea. More than 80% of them indicated they were born in Korea, without further specification. In the Japanese census data, it is not possible to identify in which part of the Korean peninsula a person was born; the place of birth of people born on the current territories of the Republic of Korea or the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is therefore noted "Korea unspecified". In the censuses of many OECD countries, the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic are aggregated under the name of the former Czechoslovakia. The same applies to the former USSR and the former Yugoslavia.

Regarding imprecise or missing information on the place of birth, there are two coding possibilities. For foreign-born people whose country of birth is not known or is too imprecise to fall into one of the continental categories, the country of birth is coded as Other (OTH). Since the definition of the category Other is specific to each OECD reporting country, the overall Other category does not have any particular meaning in terms of country or region of origin. For people whose birth status (native or foreign-born) is unknown, the country of birth is coded as Unknown (UNK). As can be seen in Table A.2 (see the methodological document), for most countries, the share of the population for whom the place of birth is completely undetermined is very small. However, a few countries have a significant proportion of the population with an unknown place of birth (in particular the Slovak Republic, Germany, Australia, Switzerland and New Zealand). For the OECD area as a whole, the share of people with an unknown place of birth is less than 1%.

Due to confidentiality issues or imprecise information, the place of birth is sometimes recorded at the continental level instead of the country level. The detailed list of the countries and regions of birth represented in the database is provided in Table A.3 (see the methodological document).

This database contains information on several demographic and labour market characteristics of the population of 28 OECD countries around the year 2000, by country of birth. The OECD countries included are Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, the Slovak Republic, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Most of the thematic files of the database include three core variables: the country of residence, the country of birth and educational attainment. Other variables available in the database include age, gender, citizenship, duration of stay, labour force status, occupation, sector of activity and field of study.

In general, the database covers only employed aged 15 and older.