Public-domain ebook
by United States. Central Intelligence Agency
Language: en28,445 downloads on Project Gutenberg
Subjects
In: CIA World Factbooks·Encyclopedias/Dictionaries/Reference
Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #27509.
The 2006 CIA World Factbook is a comprehensive reference compendium produced by the United States Central Intelligence Agency, cataloguing political, geographic, economic and social data for every nation. The book opens with a detailed entry on Albania, listing official languages, literacy rates, government structure, administrative divisions, and a snapshot of its recent political leadership. It then moves on to an economic overview that quantifies GDP, sectoral composition, trade balances and infrastructure, followed by sections on communications, transportation, military organization and transnational issues such as drug trafficking and emigration. The entry is dense with statistics, official titles and institutional descriptions, offering a factual portrait of the country as of late 2006.
The Factbook’s tone is terse, objective and data‑driven, reflecting the analytical style of an intelligence agency in the early‑2000s. Its prose is devoid of narrative flourish, favoring bullet‑point facts and tables. Readers who need reliable, up‑to‑date country profiles for research, policy analysis, or comparative studies will find it especially useful, as will students and professionals in political science, geography and international relations.
The opening · free to read
- Country information has been updated as of 19 December 2006.
- There have been some significant changes to the latest edition of The World Factbook. The successful secession referendum held in Montenegro in May of 2006 allowed it to legally leave its union with Serbia the following month. These two Balkan countries have now been formally recognized and are listed separately in the Factbook.
- In the Government category, the 'Capital' entry has been greatly expanded and now contains up to four subfields, including significant new information having to do with time. The subfields consist of the name of the capital itself, its geographic coordinates, the time difference at the capital from coordinated universal time (UTC), and, if applicable, information on daylight saving time (DST). Where appropriate, a special note has been added to highlight those countries that have multiple time zones.
- The Transnational issues category now has a "Trafficking in persons" entry. Human trafficking connotes modern-day slavery and this important new field will include information on the most egregious countries (Tier 2 Watch List and Tier 3) as listed in the US State Department's annual report.
- A new Appendix G lists Weights and Measures. The appendix includes information on mathematical notation and metric interrelationships, as well as over 400 examples of standard conversion factors.
- Revision of some individual country maps, first introduced in the 2001 edition, is continued in this edition. Several regional maps have also been updated to reflect boundary changes and place name spelling changes.
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The World Factbook (2006) - Country Listing
[Transcriber's note: To search on a country in this file, prefix the country's name with "@", e.g. "@Afghanistan". "Afghanistan" will find all occurrences; prefixing it with "@" will find the correct location.]
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