Research infrastructure for small island economies is thin, and the gaps are small enough that most people patch them by hand. A hand-patched reference list is an undocumented editing step. It breaks quietly when the data are refreshed or when someone else reruns the script, and it leaves a reviewer nothing to check. Everything below started as a patch I needed for my own work and ended up maintained in the open.
All of it is openly licensed, version-controlled, and deposited with a persistent identifier.
R packages
On CRAN since July 2026 · CC BY 4.0 · with the DCDC Network, University of Aruba
Reference data and helpers for small island states and sub-sovereign territories. General-purpose country-code tools resolve sovereign states reliably and handle non-independent jurisdictions inconsistently: Bonaire, Sint Eustatius, and Saba share the single ISO code BQ, so any analysis needing them as separate observations has to patch the data by hand. The package splits them into disambiguating sub-codes, carries the SIDS and sub-national island jurisdiction classifications that no code-conversion package ships, and adds coordinates, great-circle distances, and distance-decayed market access. It extends countrycode rather than replacing it, and depends on nothing else.
Experimental · in development
A small ggplot2 grammar for reading a value trajectory against a boundary that can move. Safe-operating-space visuals, from Doughnut Economics to the planetary-boundaries wheel, almost always draw the threshold as a fixed line. A complex-adaptive-systems reading treats it as endogenous: the safe boundary rises and falls with the system’s own adaptive capacity, so it belongs in the plot as a data series rather than a constant. The package makes that choice visible on the page, shading overshoot and slack on ordinary Cartesian coordinates.
Datasets
island-research-reference-data
CC BY 4.0 · maintained by the DCDC Network, University of Aruba
The upstream reference list behind islandcodes: countries and territories with SIDS status and tier, sub-national island jurisdiction status, World Bank region and income group, political association, and the four defining criteria, in a form that is also XLSForm-compatible for survey work. The v1.0.0 release maps all 57 SIDS sovereign and associate members against the four binary criteria and ships the R scripts that visualise the decomposition.