ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY, SPATIAL ECONOMICS AND REGIONAL SCIENCE
经济地理学,空间经济学与区域科学

The characteristics and interrelations of three disciplines above-mentioned are expounded and compared. The author deems that economic geography and spacial economics are borderline subjects between geography and economics, whereas regional science is a synthetical area inclined to both economics and geography. So far as the formative years, economic geography's age has gone beyond one century, spacial economics appeared in general, after the second world war, and the regional science was merely established in 1950'. The author considers that a common theoretic basis for the three fields is the locational theory, by which the regularilies of spacial economic activities are fully probed. In this paper, the developments, contents and categories of the three disciplines as well as their basis-location theory are fully illustrated. By the way, the author puts forward three natures of regional science-synthesizing, regionalizing and foreseeing. All the parts of this article are carried out by the principles of integration of theory with practice and the comparison between China and abroad.