Path-dependence and its implication for regional development
路径依赖理论及其地方经济发展隐喻

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.