The impact of poverty cycles on economic research: evidence from econometric analysis

Abstract

Poverty is a global problem, and fighting it is a historical task faced by humanity. The outbreak of poverty crises has a certain cyclicality, and the development of economic research may react to poverty cycles. To validate this view, we take the United States as an empirical example and establish a quantitative research architecture based on the bibliometrics and econometrics. In the first place, we conduct a bibliometric analysis of selected search terms relevant to poverty cycles. After that, the time-series data in the actual economy are collected for reflecting the trends and fluctuations in economic activity affected by poverty cycles. Meanwhile, with both bibliometric and economic data, a detrending measure via the band-pass (BP) filter is performed to estimate cycles. Finally, the Granger causality tests are implemented to explore the interaction between poverty cycles and economic research directly. As a supplement, this paper also provides a quantitative evaluation analysis, namely impulse-response functions, to investigate the influence of economic variables on bibliometric ones. The final results show there indeed exists an impact of poverty cycles in economic activity on relevant discussions in the scientific literature.