This data set contains the administrative boundaries at country level of the world and is based on the geometry from EBM v12.x. of EuroGeographics for the members of Eurogeographics, the Global Administrative Units Layer (2015) from FAO (UN) and geometry from the Turkish National Statistical Office. This dataset consists of 2 feature classes (regions, boundaries) per scale level and there are 6 different scale levels (100K, 1M, 3M, 10M, 20M and 60M). The public dataset is available at 1M, 3M, 10M, 20M, 60M, while the full dataset at 100K is restricted. This metadata only refers to the full dataset (polygon) at 100k (CNTR_RG_100K_2016 in the GISCO database) and shall only be used internally by the EEA. This metadata has been slightly adapted from the original metadata file provided by Eurostat (European Commission) and is to be used only for internal EEA purposes. For reference, the original metadata file provided by ESTAT (CNTR_2016.xml) is provided together with the dataset. The public dataset is available for download on http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cache/GISCO/distribution/v2/countries/countries-2016-files.html