A Review and Prospect on Regional Policy Research

Regional policies refer to a series of policies, which can optimize the spatial collocation of resources and control the spread of regional discrepancies. With the development of human society, material and non material element flow among different regions, and regional economy takes on different characters; accordingly, regional discrepancies are enlarging. So it is important for central government to harmonize regional relationships by using regional policy. Of course, regional policy has brought great benefits on many countries and regions. But at the same time, there are a lot of problems in this field. For example, people have no clear ideas on regional policy, theoretic studies are not closely combined with practice works, the effects of regional policy often departs from its original objects, and so on. Especially, China's regional policy is weak on theoretic research, and the practice status is anxious. Detailedly, the cost of reional policy is rather high, there are so many accidental factors in the process of implementing regional policy, the contradictions among different interest main bodies appear continuously, and it is very hard to harmonize the relationships between regional policy and other special policies. In order to clear up the complicated thinking of regional policy and find out the impediment factors, which influence successful implement of regional policy, on the base of general review of regional policy, the paper gives a basic judgement of China's regional policy--it has not built up a canonical operating and managing system under market economy mechanism. This paper also puts forward several new research tasks of regional policy. What is the essential reason that results in the effect of regional policy departing from its original objects? What is the essential reason that causes China's regional policy taking on such situation? What are the new ideas of regional policy research? The authors simply set forth their views on these questions, and hope to arose other scholars' interest and discussion on this topic.