路径依赖是理解经济社会系统演化的重要概念,同时也有着明显的地理学涵义。但相对于在经济管理等领域的研究,路径依赖理论在经济地理学和区域经济领域的研究还相对较少。本文系统梳理了路径依赖理论的起源及其在技术变迁、制度变化与社会政治文化等领域的扩展;回顾了该理论在经济地理学中的引入及其发展;并重点探讨了如何运用路径依赖理论分析区域经济演化的机理。本文认为地方经济发展过程中存在着两种路径依赖效应:一种是以企业衍生、聚集经济为驱动力的路径依赖;一种是由于过度专业化、忽略外部联系而导致的路径依赖,即锁定。最后文章还分析了现有经济地理里路径依赖研究的不足以及未来的研究方向。

Path dependence is an important concept applied in explaining the evolutionary process and dynamics of the social and economic systems,and is also useful for understanding the evolution of economic landscape.Despite this concept has received increasing attention from the fields of economics and management in recent years,we has little knowledge about its implication for economic geography and regional economics.This paper reviews the origin of the path dependence theory and its application in a variety of fields including technological change,institutional evolution and social culture;reviews the literatures of applying the path dependence in explaining some important issues of economic geography;in particular,in understanding the mechanisms of regional economic evolution.This paper argues that there are two mechanisms of path dependence driving the evolution of regional economy: one is that the regional growth is driven by spin-offs and spatial clustering;the other is that over-specialization and the ignoring of external relations together cause regional lock-in.In the final part,the paper points out the short defects of the existing studies of economic geography on path dependence and the future research directions.