CountriesRegions or continents?
School books usually count seven continents: Africa, Antarctica, Asia, Australia (or Oceania), Europe, North America and South America. Statistics offices often use regions instead, and treat North and South America as one region called the Americas. This site uses regions, with sub-regions such as Southern Asia or Western Europe, because the data is organised that way.
A few countries lie on two continents, such as Russia, Turkey, Egypt and Kazakhstan. Each is listed once, in the region its data source gives.
The regions side by side
| Region | Entries | UN members | People | Share of world | Area |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Africa | 59 | 54 | 1.55 billion | 19% | 30.4 million km² |
| Americas | 56 | 35 | 1.05 billion | 13% | 42.3 million km² |
| Asia | 50 | 46 | 4.82 billion | 59% | 31.7 million km² |
| Europe | 53 | 44 | 746 million | 9% | 23.1 million km² |
| Oceania | 27 | 14 | 47.3 million | 1% | 8.51 million km² |
| Antarctic | 5 | 0 | no permanent population | 0% | 14 million km² |
"Entries" counts everything with a country code, including territories. People and area are added up by us from the figures on each country page.
What a sub-region is
Each region is divided again into sub-regions, such as Southern Asia, Western Africa or the Caribbean. Countries in one sub-region are usually neighbours with linked histories, and statistics are often published for the sub-region as a whole. India belongs to Southern Asia, which in this data also holds Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Iran, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka. Open a region to see its sub-regions compared.