西方经济地理学研究进展

20世纪80年代以来,西方经济地理学与经济学、政治学、社会学、管理学等社会科学广泛融合,呈现出空前繁荣的局面。本文对这一时期西方经济地理学的思潮演变、热点研究领域以及政策研究等方面进行梳理。西方经济地理学在经历了地理学的“新经济地理学”和经济学的“新经济地理学”两个影响深远的变革后,研究领域和主题逐步走向多样化与复杂化。本文综述了8个热点研究领域,包括区域与地方发展、经济全球化、产业地理、劳动力地理、创新与创意地理、消费地理、环境经济地理和金融地理的研究进展,并讨论了经济地理学与政策研究的关系,最后总结了西方经济地理学的特点。

Progress of economic geography in the West: A literature review

Since the 1980s, the western countries have developed into the postindustrial society with the dominance of knowledge based economies and services. The societal economic transformations make the space-economy relations more complex. Economic actors are embedded in the complex global-local system. Economic geography starts to go beyond economics and widely borrows theories and methods from sociology, management, institutional economics, anthropology, and cultural studies. This paper provides a comprehensive literature review about the progress in the western economic geography in the last three decades, documenting the changes of research perspectives, progresses in hot research areas and policy relevance. The mainstream economic geography has experienced a number of turns in research perspectives, including new regionalism, institutional turn, cultural turn, relational turn and evolutionary turn. Political economy remains one of the influential perspectives in the research of economic geography, especially in the global financial crisis. Based on the analysis of knowledge network of economic geography built with key words, this paper identifies eight hot research areas in the western economic geography and reviews their progresses in research. Those areas include region and local development, industrial geography, economic globalization, labor geography, innovation geography, consumption geography, financial geography and environmental economic geography. Finally, this paper summarizes the key features of economic geography in the west and proposes some implications for economic geographers in China.