That's not quite what is going on. I had to do a paper for class recently that was looking at economic indicators. If I needed data on "Agriculture & Rural Development":
I thought it was really easy. I ended up having to visit multiple download links, but stitching the data together was simple using Python.
Without looking at the paper, I'm not sure what exactly they have. Have they just done the stitching already and are providing the complete data set? Or is there additional data not covered in the csv downloads?
Edit: Having looked a the paper it looks like the data they scraped was not in the CSVs. But I really cannot tell. If that is the case, I don't know why only some data is available as a bulk download and other data is not. So...back to your original point.
http://data.worldbank.org/topic/agriculture-and-rural-develo...
Down at the bottom is a link that will give you a csv file:
http://api.worldbank.org/v2/en/topic/1?downloadformat=csv
I thought it was really easy. I ended up having to visit multiple download links, but stitching the data together was simple using Python.
Without looking at the paper, I'm not sure what exactly they have. Have they just done the stitching already and are providing the complete data set? Or is there additional data not covered in the csv downloads?
Edit: Having looked a the paper it looks like the data they scraped was not in the CSVs. But I really cannot tell. If that is the case, I don't know why only some data is available as a bulk download and other data is not. So...back to your original point.