geoplot: A new command to draw maps in Stata

Regional distributions of economic and other societal characteristics are often illustrated using choropleth maps because such maps are self-explanatory and easy to understand. There are a variety of great tools for creating such maps – either as dedicated packages in general-purpose software such as R and Python, or as stand-alone cartographic applications such as QGIS – but support in Stata has always been very limited. In this talk I will present a new Stata package called geoplot that aims to fill this gap. The package provides a flexible and easy-to-use framework for managing and plotting cartographic data. Multiple layers of spatial elements such as regions, borders, lakes, roads, labels, and symbols can be freely combined and the appearance of elements (e.g., color) can be varied depending on the merged statistical data. Compared to previous solutions in Stata, geoplot offers more user convenience and much more functionality. I will give an overview of the basic concepts of the framework and illustrate its use with examples based on socio-economic data from Switzerland.