Interesting graph. I wonder if this is a “what comes forest, chicken versus egg?” phenomenon. Correlated but not causal, perhaps? Those poor countries don’t have sufficient money for basic needs, infrastructure, law enforcement, etc., so they may not even have money for R&D when basic human needs are not being met.

Came here to say that. R-squared would be 0.09, then? Without a p-value, it means nothing.