[R-sig-Geo] Example country data to plot

[Muenchen, Robert A (Bob)]

Hi All,

I'm looking for a data set of miscellaneous country measures like population, education, crime, etc. The particular variables aren't that important. I'll use the data for maps and non-spatial plots such as bar plots, scatter plots, etc. If all goes well it'll end up in a book, so I either need to be able to distribute the data or (much better) simply point to a data frame in an R package already on CRAN if I can find one. 

The UN Data at http://data.un.org/Explorer.aspx?d=UNESCO provides plenty of variables that would work and it's re-distributable, but each topic is in a separate file and in a slightly different format making a merger a fair amount of work. Does anyone know of an existing file I can use?

Thanks,
Bob

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