The Causes of Chronic and Transient Poverty and Their Implications for Poverty Reduction Policy in Rural China

The study focuses on two components of total poverty: chronic and transient poverty, and investigates their relative importance in total observed poverty, as well as the determinants of each components. We found that transient poverty accounts for a large proportion of total poverty observed in the poor rural areas of China. By analyzing the determinants of the two types of poverty, we found that household demographic characteristics, such as age of the head of households, family sizes, labour participation ratio, and educational level of the head of the households, are very important to the poverty status of households. These factors matter more to chronic poverty than transient poverty, and have greater impacts on the poverty measured by consumption than that measured by income. Besides the demographic factors of households, other household factors like physical stocks, the composition of income, and the amount of cultivated lands also have significant effects on both chronic and transient poverty. It is also confirmed that change in cash holding and saving and borrowing grain are used by rural households to cope with income variation and smooth their consumption. Attributes of community where the households reside are also important to poverty. With very few exceptions, we did not find that poverty programs have significant impact on poverty reduction at the households' level. We interpreted this as the poverty programs benefiting the wealthy more than the poor in a given poor area. The main reason for this could be that the implementation design of these programs fails to target the poor.Income risk, chronic poverty, transient poverty, poverty program evaluation, China

COMPARING PRICE MOVEMENTS OF OPTIONS AND THE UNDERLYING INDEX

In theory, a call option and its underlying index should move in the same direction, while a put option and its underlying index should move in opposite directions. This property is referred to as the Empirical Monotonicity Property (EMP) when applied to time series of prices. In this paper, we use daily call and put options? data to conduct empirical tests of the EMP, including three violation types. Further, we investigate the effect of grouping the option prices by their Black-Scholes implied volatility and by moneyness, and also the effect of using different quotes (bid, offer, and bid-offer midpoint). In addition to EMP, which depends on the signs of the price changes, we also test another theoretical constraint concerning the magnitude of these changes. This is followed by a discussion of the possible causes for violations of the EMP. We use regression analysis to test whether volatility changes may be one of these causes. Lastly, we summarize the implications of our study to hedging strategies

Saccade target selection in Chinese reading

In Chinese reading, there are no spaces to mark the word boundaries, so Chinese readers cannot target their saccades to the center of a word. In this study, we investigated how Chinese readers decide where to move their eyes during reading. To do so, we introduced a variant of the boundary paradigm in which only the target stimulus remained on the screen, displayed at the saccade landing site, after the participant's eyes crossed an invisible boundary. We found that when the saccade target was a word, reaction times in a lexical decision task were shorter when the saccade landing position was closer to the end of that word. These results are consistent with the predictions of a processing-based strategy to determine where to move the eyes. Specifically, this hypothesis assumes that Chinese readers estimate how much information is processed in parafoveal vision and saccade to a location that will carry novel information

Mobile Internet based M-Commerce Management Architecture & System

The mobile Internet exits already in very many forms on the market. However, there are definitely still a lot of possibilities to improve the current concepts and solution, and thus a lot of room for future R&D activities. This paper is divided five parts as followings: First of all, introduction; Secondly, the basic concept of mobile Internet is introduced, and its’ develop- ment status is described simply; Thirdly, the process of come into being M-commerce based on Internet and the existing modes of M-commerce are discussed respectively; the differences between E-commerce and Mcommerce are also shown in the paper; Fourthly, an M-commerce system model is presented, the model involves its’ basic elements such as hierarchical architecture, management mechanism, system decision-making, application procedure etc; Fifthly, development trend and application fields for coming the new economics times are forecasted; Finally, how to build a M-commerce management system and make applications for business via CERNET** (one of the biggest Internet platform in China) are introduced primarily in end of the paper

Research Progress of Vitamin D and Autoimmune Diseases

As a fat-soluble vitamin, Vitamin D is a necessary hormone to maintain normal physiological activities of the body. In recent years, vitamin D has been considered as a new neuroendocrine-immunomodulatory hormone, and researchers have paid more attention to the study of immune regulatory mechanism. It is not only related to calcium and phosphorus metabolism, bone metabolism and other important metabolic mechanisms of the body, but also closely related to the immune regulation mechanism of the body. Vitamin D deficiency caused by many factors can play a certain role in the development of autoimmune diseases. In this paper, the related mechanisms of vitamin D affecting autoimmune diseases were reviewed, with a view to expound the close correlation between vitamin D and autoimmune diseases, so as to find new diagnosis and treatment approaches for clinical autoimmune diseases and improve the quality of life of patients with autoimmune diseases

The autophagic degradation of cytosolic pools of peroxisomal proteins by a new selective pathway.

Damaged or redundant peroxisomes and their luminal cargoes are removed by pexophagy, a selective autophagy pathway. In yeasts, pexophagy depends mostly on the pexophagy receptors, such as Atg30 for Pichia pastoris and Atg36 for Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the autophagy scaffold proteins, Atg11 and Atg17, and the core autophagy machinery. In P. pastoris, the receptors for peroxisomal matrix proteins containing peroxisomal targeting signals (PTSs) include the PTS1 receptor, Pex5, and the PTS2 receptor and co-receptor, Pex7 and Pex20, respectively. These shuttling receptors are predominantly cytosolic and only partially peroxisomal. It remains unresolved as to whether, when and how the cytosolic pools of peroxisomal receptors, as well as the peroxisomal matrix proteins, are degraded under pexophagy conditions. These cytosolic pools exist both in normal and mutant cells impaired in peroxisome biogenesis. We report here that Pex5 and Pex7, but not Pex20, are degraded by an Atg30-independent, selective autophagy pathway. To enter this selective autophagy pathway, Pex7 required its major PTS2 cargo, Pot1. Similarly, the degradation of Pex5 was inhibited in cells missing abundant PTS1 cargoes, such as alcohol oxidases and Fox2 (hydratase-dehydrogenase-epimerase). Furthermore, in cells deficient in PTS receptors, the cytosolic pools of peroxisomal matrix proteins, such as Pot1 and Fox2, were also removed by Atg30-independent, selective autophagy, under pexophagy conditions. In summary, the cytosolic pools of PTS receptors and their cargoes are degraded via a pexophagy-independent, selective autophagy pathway under pexophagy conditions. These autophagy pathways likely protect cells from futile enzymatic reactions that could potentially cause the accumulation of toxic cytosolic products.Abbreviations: ATG: autophagy related; Cvt: cytoplasm to vacuole targeting; Fox2: hydratase-dehydrogenase-epimerase; PAGE: polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis; Pot1: thiolase; PMP: peroxisomal membrane protein; Pgk1: 3-phosphoglycerate kinase; PTS: peroxisomal targeting signal; RADAR: receptor accumulation and degradation in the absence of recycling; RING: really interesting new gene; SDS: sodium dodecyl sulphate; TCA, trichloroacetic acid; Ub: ubiquitin; UPS: ubiquitin-proteasome system Vid: vacuole import and degradation