Collation issues

[Bas van Meurs]

Hi, I noticed that the following does not work in the MySQL command-line tool on the 'world' database (example database for the certification book):
SELECT Name, Population
FROm Country
WHERE (Continent, Code) = ('Europe', 'NLD')

ERROR 1267 (HY000): Illegal mix of collations (utf8_general_ci,IMPLICIT) and (latin1_swedish_ci,COERCIBLE) for operation '='

But the following does work:
mysql> SELECT Name, Population FROM Country WHERE Continent = 'Europe' AND Code = 'NLD';
+--------------+------------+
| Name | Population |
+--------------+------------+
| Netherlands_ | 15864000 |
+--------------+------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

I think that the columns are UTF-8 (I changed that) but the input seems to be latin. It seems that in the first case there is implicit conversion of the charset, but in the second case there is not. Is that correct? And what does coercibility mean?

Regards,
Bas