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In rural poverty governance, one of the most significant challenges faced by developing countries is to reduce the negative impact of economic growth fluctuations on poverty reduction, so as to achieve a win-win situation of "economic growth and poverty reduction". Based on the provincial-level panel data and data of poverty-stricken counties from 2000 to 2016 in China, this paper evaluates the poverty reduction effect of rural public expenditure from the perspectives of cyclical fluctuation and spatial spillover by using the instrumental variable method. It was found that rural public expenditure is pro-cyclical, and after exclusion of the cyclical factors, the essence of fluctuations is still pro-cyclical. Further research also shows that rural public expenditure has a significant spatial spillover effect on poverty reduction, which is even greater than the direct effect. Based on these findings, the policy implications can be that it is critical to provide moderate-scale and stable rural public expenditure, and establish a multi-level and differentiated agricultural insurance system supported by the government. This paper reveals the spatial interaction mechanism between public expenditure and poverty reduction, and also provides reference for correct evaluation of the economic growth and poverty reduction in developing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The mean-reverting nature of freight rates is one of the important subjects in maritime economics. The classic understanding of maritime economics (and that of the shipping industry) suggests that freight rate processes are mean-reverting and approach the level decided by the demand/supply ratio. However, statistical tests on freight rate processes often reveal these processes to be non-stationary, which means the processes would not have a mean-reverting nature. In this study, we investigated the mean-reverting nature of Panamax freight rates (Baltic Panamax 4 T/C Average) for two "means": the actual freight rate process itself, and the deviation process of actual freight rates from estimated ones based on the demand/supply ratio. The AR (1) model can be applied to both processes, and their autoregressive coefficient φ was between 0 and 1. In the actual freight process, φ was close to 1, and a unit root test failed to reject that the process is non-stationary. By contrast, in the deviation process, φ was sufficiently smaller than 1, and a unit root test rejected that the process is non-stationary. The result can resolve the contradiction between two views on mean-reverting nature; if we focus on the actual freight rate process itself and do not consider demand/supply, the process is non-stationary and does not have a mean-reverting nature. If we focus on the deviation process of the actual freight rates from the level decided by the demand/supply ratio, the process is stationary and tends to approach zero. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although there are several mechanisms within theoretical models acknowledging that supply shocks can account for an important part of output fluctuations, even in the short-run, policy practitioners continue endorsing the idea that only demand shocks explain them. This article provides empirical evidence on several Latin American countries and the USA to show that the share of output variance explained by supply shocks in the short-run is substantial. It also offers a more agnostic implementation of the Blanchard-Quah type of structural analysis that focuses on policy evaluation. For this purpose, we propose constructing two indicators out of the historical decomposition of shocks: the goods market unbalance (GMU) and the total cyclical fluctuations (TCF). While GMU is an excess demand measurement that reveals the scope of the distortions caused by shocks, TCF, combined with GMU, helps to understand what type of shock is predominantly explaining (output and inflation) fluctuations. These two pieces of information provide a very different diagnosis than traditional output gaps and should guide monetary policy interventions more adequately. The agnosticism of this proposal has two aspects: the use of a different identification strategy and the assessment of the effects of both supply and demand shocks on output. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]