Currently I am working on a project where I need to find out whether financial aid (per capita) has an influence on the country's HDI. I have compiled a dataset, which you can find here: http://paste.ofcode.org/bKHLd3fLcY9awWQqQ6ebgX

I am looking at the best way to find out whether my research question is true. Obviously I am going to needs some kind of regression analysis, but I do not really know where to start. I have read something about panel data/longitudinal data analysis, but I am really unsure whether that is indeed what I am looking for.

I tried some things, obviously, like the following:

plm(HDI ~ Aid, data=HDIData, index=c("Country", "Year"), model="within")

But this gave me the result that an increase of one unit in aid would result in an increase of 0.0355 in HDI. This seems highly unlikely, as some countries have received 800 dollars per capita in financial aid. Granted, the P value was 0.8432, so it would be statistically insignificant, but even then, I have got no clue whether this is even remotely correct.

I also saw people running the same command, but then using log(HDI) ~ log(Aid)...?

Could someone point me in the right direction? Much obliged!