st: Point-to-Polygon in Stata

[Jeremy Wells <jwell33@tigers.lsu.edu>]

Hi all,

I have been using Dr. Pisati's fun spmap program, but I have run into
a bit of a snag.

I have a dataset of about 76,000 observations, coded by latitude/longitude,
in one country. I also have the coordinate file for the country produced by
shp2dta that includes the country's provinces. I would like to add a variable
to the dataset that codes each observation with the region from the coordinate
file, which is essentially a point-to-polygon operation.

I have tried to find a way to doing this, including this (http://www.stata.com/statalist/archive/2008-10/msg00817.html)
from Dr. Pisati, but I am not at all sure how to apply the code. (Plus,
this was written five years ago, so surely there is something that has
been developed and is a little easier to use!)

Thanks for your consideration! Please limit the responses to Stata-only
applications as I do not have access to expensive GIS software.

Jeremy Wells
Ph.D. Student
LSU Dept. of Poli. Sci.
324 Stubbs Hall
Baton Rouge, LA 70803

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