Update: Europe World Plus

New content has been added to Europa World Plus.

Europa World Plus is constantly updated as elections take place, new governments are formed and cabinets are re-shuffled. May was a particularly busy month on the political stage. Some of the highlights included:

• the appointment of a new government in Romania
• the election of François Hollande as the new President of France, the first Socialist to win the French presidency since Mitterrand in the 1980s
• government changes in Brazil, including a new Minister of Labour and Employment
• results of provincial elections in Alberta, Canada.

You can read the full run down of Europa World updates here

Access

To access Europa, go to sEURch and type in: Europa World Plus.
Click on the link in the library record to access the database.

What is the Europa World Plus database?

The database Europa World Plus is the online version of the Europa World Year Book AND the nine-volume Regional Surveys of the World series: 

Africa South of the Sahara
Central and South-Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe, Russia and Central Asia
The Far East and Australasia
The Middle East and North Africa
South America, Central America and the Caribbean
South Asia
The USA and Canada
Western Europe

Despite the variation on Europe in the title, Europa World Plus covers the entire world with all countries and many dependencies, not just European nations.

After you choose your country from an alphabetical drop-down list, Europa will give you such basic information as climate and location, but its greatest value is probably in the country profile section where you will find very useful and scholarly overviews for economic affairs and contemporary political history with subsections for domestic and foreign affairs.

Europa also provides extensive directory for each country so that you can find, for instance, lists of high-ranking government officials and of the most important media outlets. Basic statistical information for each country is also included.

In addition, Europa World Plus includes a section that profiles various International Organizations, and there is a section that provides Comparative Statistics on countries along with accompanying data that can be exported as CSV and tab-delimited data.