The list of countries for which the J2RE provides locale data doesn't seem to be very carefully selected. Albania, with a GDP of $5b and no known IT industry, is supported, but Malaysia and Singapore, with GDPs of $215b and $92b and substantial IT industries, are not.

We should define a set of criteria and then add locale data for any country that meets one of these criteria:
- one of the top xx (50?) countries by GDP
- one of the top xx (50?) countries by foreign trade
- GDP per person above $xxxx ($5000?)

For data, see
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/country.html

N/A

It turns out that there's more relevant data available than GDP: The IDC Black Book provides information about the IT market size by country. Based on their data, the following countries that are unsupported in 1.3 are expected to have an IT market size of over $1 billion in 2003:
- Singapore
- India
- Malaysia
- Thailand
- Indonesia

We're adding locale data for India (en_IN, hi_IN) under RFE 4287473, for Thailand (th_TH) under RFE 4287469. The remaining locales to be added under this RFE are: Singapore (en_SG), Malaysia (ms_MY), and Indonesia (in_ID).
  xxxxx@xxxxx   2000-08-21


The current plan is to add locale data from CLDR for the following locales:
Spanish - United States
Chinese (simplified) - Singapore
English - Malta
English - Philippines
English - Singapore
Greek - Cyprus
Indonesian - Indonesia
Malay - Malaysia
Maltese - Malta

  xxxxx@xxxxx   2005-03-22 20:14:31 GMT


Locale data for the above locales was obtained from the Unicode Consortium's Common Locale Data Repository and converted into JRE locale data format. At this point, locale names, currency names, calendar data, and format data are converted; time zone names and collation data are not.
  xxxxx@xxxxx   2005-05-26 05:54:34 GMT