how to merge panel data stored by variable?

2008/12/10 Stefan Grosse <singularitaet at gmx.net>

I have two datasets stored in tab-separated format in the following way
file1:
country           year1        year2
Germany        var1          var1
Hungary         var1          var1

file2:
country           year1        year2
Germany        var2         var2
Hungary         var2         var2

I can easily read in these files, but how can I merge them as a panel
dataset?

?cbind
?rbind

Thanks for your answer Stefan, but I think cbind/rbind does not solve
my problem.

After reading ?cbind I realised that first I should convert all the
dataset to panel separately, and then I will be able to cbind/rbind
it.

So the question is how to read in the following data from a file as a
panel dataset

country           year1        year2
Germany        var1          var1
Hungary         var1          var1

that is to have:
country        year      var1
Germany      year1    value1
Germany      year2    value1
Hungary       year1    value1
Hungary       year2    value1

if I understand well, then I can run pdata.frame on the latter with
id=country and time=year
moreover, I'll be able to cbind several var1, var2, etc data files
into one panel dataset

Viktor