Since 1990, there have been two new changes in the study of economic geography:
One is the revival of spatial economics;
The second is the change of culture and system.
These two changes were called "new economic geography" by their respective advocates, and also had different degrees of influence on the development of this discipline. On the other hand, an "evolutionary economics" based on the analogy of "biology" began to appear in 1980s, and an academic trend of thought called "evolutionary economic geography" based on the theory and method of evolutionary economics recently rose in the field of economic geography.
1. 1 Geoeconomics
1In the early 1990s, a group of economists represented by paul krugman picked up and developed econometric methods of spatial economics to analyze the agglomeration and spatial process of economic activities. Krugman called it "new economic geography" or geo-economics.
It was founded by Krugman by introducing location into mainstream economics. The basic assumption of his theory is: 1. The complete rationality of economic decision makers; Second, the equilibrium theory. The other two secondary assumptions are: increasing returns to scale and external economy.
This spatial analysis has been recognized by some economic geographers, but it has also been criticized by some economic geographers. The main problems are: simplifying the complexity of economic activities into the analysis of pure economic factors, lacking clear analysis space units and practical application significance. In the eyes of geographers who advocate comprehensive thinking, this is simply a retrogression in research. Of course, Krugman's so-called "new economic geography" also has certain positive significance. For example, it transcends neoclassical economics and explains the role of imperfect competition in spatial agglomeration. However, if we take it as the main body of research, economic geography will lose the opportunity to contribute to social development in a higher philosophical sense and can only become the "next job" of economics.
1.2 institutional economic geography
Although economists advocate spatial economic analysis, scholars in the field of social sciences question the "economy" itself. Under the profound influence of radical geography and emerging cultures (neo-liberalism and post-Fordism), mainstream economics has undergone the repositioning of theory and method, and moved towards the fields of economic heresy "institutionalism", economic sociology and cultural research. Based on this, the theoretical and methodological turn of economic geography in 1980s was based on institutionalism and economic sociology in economics, which was called institutionalism economic geography or institutional turn and cultural turn.
The rise of institutionalist economic geography stems from the path dependence in radical geography to a great extent, but it abandons the structuralist determinism in radical geography and enters the embrace of "postmodernism" and "post-structuralism" social sciences.
Institutional economic geography has effectively absorbed the theoretical tools of "embeddedness", "network analysis" and "social capital" developed by "New Economic Geography" since 1970s. According to its methodology, economic activities are the product of a specific society and system, which cannot be explained only by the individual motivation and market equilibrium of atoms, but must be understood in a wider range of social, economic and political rules, procedures and traditions. Institutional economic geography is to find out the role of various systems in shaping capitalist spatial economy, the evolution of capitalist spatial economy under the action of institutional "path dependence" and "locking" mechanisms, and the social adjustment and governance mechanism of regional and local development. According to its philosophical orientation of "postmodernism" and "post-structuralism", it emphasizes the pluralism, polycentricity and relationship of economic actors, and holds that the attributes of economic actors are constructed according to gender, race, class, culture and spatial discourse, and are by no means dominated by a single profit maximization logic.
Compared with the previous econometric revolution and political economics school, this research method and perspective has become the new economic geography of this era. The core of the cultural and institutional turn is a new understanding of "economy". First of all, the economy itself is increasingly understood as a semantic phenomenon, which is shaped by the "professional knowledge" created by economists. In this case, "economy" is no longer an objective and stable fact, but a rhetorical phenomenon. Secondly, the economy is inseparable from society and culture. Grana Vettel (1985), an economic sociologist, put forward the view that "economic activities are integrated into concrete social relations", that is, the embeddedness of economy. Later, Dicken and Thrift (1992) introduced "embeddedness" into the study of economic geography, which made the subject integrate into the cultural, social and institutional background and gained new research connotation and development direction. These seemingly illusory changes indicate a great change in thinking, that is, we can think about new development mechanisms and concepts outside the economic development track shaped by neoclassical economics. For example, participants in economic activities show different behavior characteristics according to gender, race, class and cultural differences, and the institutional environment also creates different economic behaviors. These thoughts are of great significance to the study of regional sustainable development.
Behind these changes are extensive and in-depth global social and economic changes. With the frequent transnational economic activities, the spatial relationship between local and global has become the core issue concerned by geographers. To understand and explain the persistent differences in economic activities in different regions in the process of globalization (that is, economic diversification), we must get rid of the traditional thinking framework. Therefore, the practice of global economic reform and the subsequent changes in research methods and perspectives have created many new research fields full of thinking and debate for economic geography. Two books published at the turn of the century witnessed and recorded many topics at the forefront of contemporary economic geography, namely Oxford Handbook of Economic Geography and Companion of Economic Geography. These two books are regarded as the research outline in the field of economic geography and the declaration of current and future research topics, and the debate on these topics will last for decades. Combining these two books with different emphases (the former includes the work of economists and the latter focuses on the research of geographers), the main hot areas of international economic geography research at present are:
1) globalization research. Economic globalization involves production, investment, trade, finance, talent flow and other aspects, which has brought far-reaching influence to countries, localities, enterprises and labor market. The core issue is the relationship between various "flows" formed by economic globalization and countries and places.
2) Research on the spatial impact of technological progress. In the past half century, the speed of technological progress is almost dizzying (especially information technology). The impact of such rapid technological progress on the socio-economic spatial process has not been recognized and explained. This has become a problem that geographers have to care about.
3) Research on environment and regulations. European and American economic geographers do not deliberately emphasize sustainable development, but the research on the relationship between economy and environment is a very important field at present, including circular economy, green manufacturing, environmental control methods, political ecology and other specific topics.
4) Research on regional development. New regionalism, which arose in the 1960s and 1980s, still plays an important role in the study of economic geography. The main topics include regional innovation system, industrial zone, learning zone and knowledge spillover.
5) Research on enterprise positioning and enterprise strategy. Enterprise is the main body of market economy, so it has always been an important research object of European and American economic geography. At present, important topics include enterprise cluster, time and space management of enterprises, spatial form of enterprises and spatial organization of multinational corporations.
6) Economic geography research of social problems. Including labor, gender (female), community, race, trade unions and other issues. The development of economic geography in China has gone through a unique road. In addition to the development stage, institutional environment, cultural tradition, ideology and other factors, the alternating input of academic ideas from European and American countries and the former Soviet Union also affected the development process of China's economic geography. Generally speaking, the development of China's economic geography after the founding of the People's Republic of China can be summarized as "taking the task as the discipline", that is, the primary goal and motivation of the discipline development is to meet the needs of the country, and at the same time, to promote the theoretical development and construction of the discipline with practical tasks. This kind of research work directly facing the needs of the government makes economic geography make an important contribution to the national economic construction, and also makes economic geographers widely recognized by government departments at all levels. At this point, economic geographers in Europe and America are far behind. But it is this kind of work that makes the pure theoretical research of China's economic geography relatively weak. At the same time, the change of system has also separated the theoretical accumulation process of this discipline; Some theories and knowledge accumulated during the planned economy period have lost their effectiveness to some extent. This can only show that China's economic geography is in the stage of theoretical reconstruction during the period of system reform, and we can't think that this discipline lacks theoretical basis.
After the founding of New China, in order to meet the needs of national economic planning and productivity distribution, economic geographers in China participated extensively in regional comprehensive survey, railway route selection, factory site selection, industrial base planning and agricultural zoning. While contributing to the national economic construction, it has also developed and accumulated a lot of valuable theoretical knowledge of economic geography. Such as technical and economic demonstration method of industrial layout, agricultural zoning method, industrial cluster layout theory, etc. Moreover, as early as 1970' s, economic geographers began to pay attention to the relationship between industrial development, urban construction and environmental protection, which laid the foundation for later sustainable development research.
After the reform and opening up, China's economic geography has made great progress and entered a period of diversified development, because it has got rid of the shackles of ideology. On the one hand, it has become the main research force in land development and planning, regional development, land use, industrial development and other fields, and its theoretical knowledge has had a wide impact on society. The theory of spatial structure such as "point-axis" system has become the theoretical basis of national and local land planning and regional planning. On the other hand, the drastic changes in social economy have also spawned many new research fields. Especially because township industries and foreign-funded enterprises have become the main contribution factors to economic growth in many regions, the research on township enterprises and foreign investment has become a hot field in China's economic geography in recent twenty years. The former includes the regional socio-economic environment, regional differences and the regional model of rural industrialization for the development of township enterprises. The latter includes the location preference of foreign capital, the regional influence of foreign capital and its connection with local industries. These studies have achieved many internationally comparable research results and entered the international academic arena.
Since the mid-1990s, regional and urban sustainable development has become the main research object of China's economic geography. On the one hand, this is the result of social demand-sustainable development is China's basic national policy; On the other hand, this is also the result of the older generation of geographers insisting that "geography is a science that studies the interaction and relationship between natural elements and human elements on the earth's surface and their temporal and spatial laws". It should be noted that the sustainable development of regions and cities is the research field that can give full play to the comprehensive and interdisciplinary characteristics of economic geography. In this field, economic geographers put forward the coordination theory of population-resources-environment-development (PRED) and the measurement index system of regional sustainable development, which played an important role in national and local sustainable development decision-making. In addition, economic geographers have also conducted a comprehensive study on the geographical basis of regional development in conjunction with scholars from other disciplines in order to provide a deeper theoretical basis for regional sustainable development; Participated in the comprehensive study of land cover and land use change. If the former comprehensive discipline of economic geography is now the research perspective of the discipline itself, then recent research proves that economic geography has begun to actively carry out cross-research with other geosciences and become an important and active force in the comprehensive research of the earth's surface.
Of course, the development of China's economic geography in recent twenty years has also been influenced by the academic thoughts of European and American countries. After the reform and opening up, the introduced theories and methods mainly include location theory, econometric methods and enterprise geography, and a series of related theoretical works have been published. Such as Location Theory and Regional Analysis Method (Lu Dadao), Advanced Economic Geography (Yang Wuyang, Liang Jinshe), Modern Industrial Geography (Wang Jici) and so on. These academic thoughts have played an important role in the discipline construction of economic geography in China. Compared with the previous year, a group of economic geographers began to directly participate in the research on the frontier issues of international economic geography, including industrial zones, enterprise clusters, high-tech industries, regional innovation systems, the spatial impact of information technology, and economic globalization. This shows that China's economic geography is overcoming the obstacles of system and cultural differences, and starting to connect with the international mainstream economic geography research. The study of these frontier issues will lay a more solid theoretical foundation for China's economic geography. Economic geography is a comprehensive interdisciplinary subject closely related to development stage, institutional environment, cultural tradition and ideology, and it is normal for its research scope and perspective to be diversified. It is dangerous to require the economic geography of China to be fully integrated with the economic geography of European and American countries, which will break away from the national goal that this discipline should serve and lose its important social value. But this does not deny the necessity of its integration with international academic circles. Facing the national goal at the present stage, the core issue of China's economic geography should be the sustainable development of regions and cities. Under the guidance of this core issue, we should give full play to the comprehensive and interdisciplinary characteristics of economic geography, conduct diversified research on specific topics and scientific issues, and learn more from the practice of international economic geography in research methods and perspectives. Generally speaking, we believe that the development of China's economic geography in the coming period should deal with the following relations:
1) the relationship between national goals and theoretical research. It should be acknowledged that achieving national goals is the most direct embodiment of the social value of a discipline and the main source of social recognition. However, we must also see that without the support of scientific theory, it is impossible for any discipline to achieve national goals well, and it is also impossible to participate in the process of shaping social and economic development at a higher level. The relationship between them is "standard" and "essence". Therefore, fundamentally speaking, economic geography should attach importance to theoretical research, and the theory of research must be aimed at national goals in order to better accomplish national goals.
2) The relationship between core issues and specific research topics. The core problem of a discipline is often a relatively macro scientific goal, which needs to be supported by many specific research topics, which may not be directly related to the core problem on the surface. Therefore, we can't judge the value and significance of specific research topics to the core issues by literal meaning or superficial connection; This should be avoided, especially in comprehensive and interdisciplinary subjects. In other words, research on specific topics should enjoy full "freedom". After all, scientific problems can be planned, and scientific theories cannot be planned.
3) The relationship between going to international academic circles and building economic geography with China characteristics. Recognizing the diversity of research categories and perspectives of economic geography does not mean that economic geography research between different countries does not need and cannot be exchanged. It is very important for the development of China's economic geography to carry out research in line with international academic circles. First of all, it is the need to broaden the research horizon-we need to know what important issues need to be studied under the market economy system; Secondly, it is the need of economic globalization-globalization makes many academic problems need to be studied by scholars from many countries; Third, it is the need to establish an international academic status. Of course, considering the characteristics of this subject, this kind of research cannot and cannot be divorced from the national conditions.
4) The relationship between macro research and micro research. In recent ten years, the study of economic geography in China has mostly focused on relatively macro research topics, and the study of participants in economic activities (enterprises, people, social institutions, etc.) is insufficient. ) and influencing factors. Macro-problems can usually be well combined with social (national) needs and easily recognized by the society. However, without the support of micro-case studies, macro-problem studies can easily become "castles in the air". Focusing on macro issues and starting with micro cases is the most valuable research idea.
5) The relationship between scientism and humanism. This is a problem that must be solved in the interdisciplinary academic research of nature and humanities, which is mainly reflected in the research methods and means. We believe that there can be neither "mathematical superstition" nor "uselessness of mathematical models". In this interdisciplinary subject, mathematical model is an auxiliary tool for theoretical thinking. These disciplines emphasize humanistic care, so logical reasoning (deduction and induction) may be more convincing than abstract models. In the research process of "realistic problems-theoretical assumptions-conceptual models-data acquisition (including figures and empirical facts)-theoretical reliability-theoretical implications", mathematical models are not an essential step.