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| INSTITUTIONAL THICKNESS, INSTITUTIONAL SPACE AND REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT |
| WEI Cheng1, CHEN Lie2 |
1. School of Architecture & Civil Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou 510641, China;
2 School of Geography Science and Planning, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou 510275, China |
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Abstract Economic Geography (EG)regards institution as an important medium and product that shapes different regional economic development track,and considers that region is not a fixed scope division but a changing society construction influenced by history change and society embeddedness. The paper firstly reviews the theory backgrounds and chief points of institutional turn of EG,and explores the researches and insufficiencies of western institutional EG on the basis of institutional thickness and institutional space ideas as well as their relation with regional development.It holds that the concept of institutional thickness and institutional space follows the context of the relation among industrial cluster, regional innovation, regional competitive advantages and regional development. What's more, it adds the discourse that results from institution effect. As a result, it gets rid of the situation that focuses on one single place regional development, instead, and intakes the deep level institutional adjustment and operation, institutional identification and embeddness under globalization into the explanation framework of spatial difference, proclaiming that regional institutional structure does have important impact on regional economic development. However, to some extent, the formation of institutional thickness is the spatial result of subjects' deep interaction and institutional identification, and inevitably tinted by social historical factors and accidental factors of space. The most institutional thickness regions are specific regions spontaneously formed by developed countries and regions, and have much with the local specific situation and time-space environment. Furthermore, the concept of institutional thickness mainly sourced from developed countries and regions with obvious features of economic development stage and institutional characters, focusing more on description and explaination of the industrial development and innovative network of certain region, and always having things to do with regional informal institution. But it pays less attention to regional formal institution developing countries and regions. Generally speaking, this paper suggests that if the conversion in China could take the institutional space idea, it benefit the ability to interpret China's regional spatial differences.
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Received: 10 October 2007
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2009, Vol. 24 
