The country or territory tier holds the units that international practice lists at national level: sovereign states, and the territories and dependencies a state administers without them being sovereign.

Both are on this tier because both are the top unit of their own administrative chain. A dependency has its own subdivisions, its own register and often its own laws, so treating it as a subdivision of the administering state would misplace everything below it.

Which of the two a given region is belongs to the region type, where country, territory, dependency and special administrative region are separate words. The tier says only that nothing except a group or a continent sits above it.