Hey folks - just noticing this got bumped - did I miss something happening? Was there a reason?
I can't remember if I uploaded a new version with the 2014 data, but I did do the spreadsheet for that too so I'll get that up when I'm back from work today.
Thanks to wifibandit (and Atlantis) for the reminder:
Now that Yearbooks 1927-2014 in PDF (Thanks Atlantis!) are available for download via bittorrent, Can we organize a way to include ALL data?
As I might have tried to explain before, the difficulty is not so much getting the data into a spreadsheet, but it's the wonderful world of international politics and countries changing names and borders that takes time to work out.
Things have been pretty stable for the past 15 years or so, but working back to 1988 things start getting really complicated in the 80's, especially with the Soviet Union in Europe. It can certainly be done, but it just takes time and patience. If someone else wants to have a go, then by all means go ahead.
Maybe I'm just going about it the wrong way and making a mess of it - but I just think if you want actual useful data for individual countries going back as far as possible then you need to work out the country changes. You could ignore them and just dump everything into a messy spreadsheet, but then for some countries (like Russia etc.) you would only have data going back as far as those countries existed in name.