Skip to contents

Downloading the Full IDS Data

Source: vignettes/downloading-the-full-ids-data.qmd

The wbids package provides two ways to download the complete International Debt Statistics (IDS) dataset.

With ids_bulk(), you need to download and combine multiple Excel files:

# Step 1: Get list of available files
files <- ids_bulk_files()

# Step 2: Download each file
data_list <- lapply(files$file_url, ids_bulk)

# Step 3: Combine all data
full_data <- rbind(data_list)

With ids_get_ed(), you get everything in one step:

full_data <- ids_get_ed("debt_statistics")

The ids_get_ed() function is faster because:

  • Downloads one optimized file instead of multiple Excel files
  • Uses Parquet format which is faster to read than Excel
  • Data is already processed and ready to use

For most use cases, ids_get_ed() is the recommended approach due to its simplicity and performance benefits.