Research on the Path of County Level Institutional Evolution and its Empirical Implications

The author analyzes the history of institutional arrangements in county area and examines the existence of path dependence.The research shows that in county area,compulsory and induced institutional evolution have co-existed and usually reinforced each other in terms of economic institutional arrangements;whereas the evolution of financial institutions in the same area have taken a different path.Though this could be partly explained and justified by the background of national policies of economic reconfiguration,the lack of attention for bottom-up induced institutional evolution and consequential shortfall in the supply of financial institutions have,to some extent,affected the development of county area economy.