ISO 3166-1 Numerical - Country Codes
ISO 3166-1 defines codes for the names of countries, territories, and other special areas of geographical interest. It is part of the ISO 3166 standard published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). ISO 3166-1 is broken down into 3 sets of country codes: ISO 3166-1 Alpha-3, ISO 3166-1 Alpha-2, and ISO 3166-1 Numeric.
ISO 3166-1 Numerical are three-digit numerical country codes that are identical to those developed and maintained by the United Nations Statistics Division. An advantage of numeric codes over alphabetic codes is script (writing system) independence. Since the other ISO 3166-1 country codes use characters from the Latin Alphabet, issues can arise for people and systems using non-Latin scripts (such as Chinese, Japanese, etc.). The ISO 3166-1 Numerical country codes help to negate this problem.
ISO 3166-1 Numerical country codes are commonly used in instances where countries are not familiar with Latin characters.