关键词: 制度, 交易成本, 生产成本, 区位分析, 中国农村工业

Abstract:

The emergence and recent rapid growth of rural industry in China is a striking and in many ways unique phenomenon. How to explain it with the approach of locational analysis is a very important and interesting topic to economic geographers. However, for more than a century, the phenomenon of spatial agglomeration of economic activities has been occupying the central position in the study of economic and industrial geography, so it is very difficult to provide powerful explanations to China's highly dispersing rural industrialization with normative or modern locational analysis. Based on the hypothesis of "economic man", this paper integrates a new set of theoretical tools involving new economic and industrial geography, new institutionalist and evolutionary economics and normative locational analysis, and advances an integrative framework of locational analysis which synthesizes four location factors: institutions, technology, market and resource endowment. In this framework, each location factor affects the industrial location behaviors through affecting the transaction costs or the production costs. In particular, the paper argues that the institutional factors and the mechanism of transaction costs are critical for understanding the high speed and scattering distribution and great regional imbalance of China's rural industrial development.

Key words: institutions, transaction costs, production costs, locational analysis, rural industry in China