Searching For a Good World Map

I’m working on a map-building project for the Western Hemisphere. I’d like a good base map with political boundaries. to use that we’ll then add labels, features, and data to, preferably in SVG format with only a few layers. That lead me to look on MediaWiki Commons. I found a couple of helpful files:

• BlankMap-World: The grey-and-white SVG map used frequently on Wikipedia. Each country is its own single polygon and borders are a thin gap between. This allows for easy re-coloring of the map. The countries are named in the object properties, however, so a savvy student wouldn’t have to do much research for labeling.
• World map configurable: like the base grey-and-white Wikipedia uses, but when you place the mouse cursor over a country, the name pops up in a tooltip. It would make a decent answer key, but the little click-point circles might be distracting to some users.

Here’s the Western Hemisphere base map I generate from BlankMap-World. I had to remove the circle-shaped “handles” that appeared when I cut-and-pasted the Americas to a new document.