新经济地理学及其展望

The New Economic Geography and Its Perspective

对新经济地理学的起源、发展、遭受的质疑及未来发展趋势做一简要的评述。经济活动的地理因素一直是许多经济学家、地理学家、规划学者以及区域科学家所关注的问题。20世纪80年代以来,以报酬递增、不完全竞争为假设前提,以数学建模为分析工具的新经济地理学的研究有了不断发展,但由于新经济地理学的核心模型在许多方面显得过于简单,受到了来自经济地理学、区域经济学和城市经济学的质疑和批评。有鉴于此,新经济地理学今后的研究除了考虑要素流动性、规模报酬递增、运输成本等关键因素之外,至少有3个可供未来研究的方向:扩展理论研究范围、加强实证研究、探讨新经济地理学的福利和政策涵义。

The geographic aspect of economic activities has long been the interests of economists, geographers, planners and regional scientists. Since 1980s, based on the hypothesis of increasing returns and imperfect competition and taking mathematical models as tools, new economic geography has developed increasingly. However, it has been criticized and questioned by economic geography, regional economics and urban economics because its core model is too simple. In view of this, except for liquidity of factors, increasing returns to scale and transportation costs, there are at least three other areas for new economic geography to focus on in the future： expanding theoretical study, enhancing empirical study and exploring its welfare and policy implications.