Thanks for the replies.Actually I had stylized my
problem in my post. My data set is as follows:
X USA 25
X Canada 45
Y USA 122
Y France 144
Y Germany 133
Basically the regions are not the same for each firm,
and there are a vast number of regions. In addition
I'm not interested in sales falling in each region,
but merely the dispersion in sales across various
regions, whatever they might be. Hence Michael's
suggestion of using by sort works. I can merely assign
1, 2 for X and 1,2,3 for Y. Thanks David for your
suggestion. I look forward to Stata 11.
Shyam
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