地理锁定与政策调节：中国东西部区域经济格局的演变逻辑与路径选择

Geographical Lock-in and Policy Regulation: The Evolutionary Logic and Policy Choices of Regional Economic Patterns between Eastern and Western China

摘要: 黑河–腾冲一线作为我国人口与经济地理格局的重要参照，长期反映了自然禀赋、交通成本与市场集聚对区域发展的结构性约束。本文以1935年至2025年的长时段演化为观察窗口，引入新经济地理学的“核心–边缘”分析视角，系统考察这一分界两侧人口与经济格局的延续性、阶段性变化及其政策调节逻辑。研究表明，农业文明时期的水土承载力与工业化初期的规模报酬递增共同强化了东南半壁的要素集聚；进入21世纪以来，西部大开发、财政转移支付、交通基础设施建设以及“东数西算”等新兴生产要素布局，构成了系统性的区域再平衡政策组合，在维持人口空间格局总体稳定的前提下，持续推动公共服务均等化与人均福利的跨区域收敛。

Abstract: The Heihe-Tengchong line has long served as a key reference for China’s population distribution and economic geography, embodying the structural constraints that natural endowments, transport costs, and market agglomeration impose on regional development. Drawing on long-run historical evidence spanning 1935 to 2025 and on the core-periphery framework of new economic geography, this paper traces the persistence, evolution, and policy reshaping of regional patterns on either side of this divide. We argue that agricultural carrying capacity and the increasing returns of early industrialization jointly reinforced the concentration of population and economic activity in the southeast. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, the Western Development Strategy, fiscal transfer payments, large-scale infrastructure investment, and the deployment of emerging productive factors—most notably the “Eastern Data and Western Computing” project—have together constituted a systemic regional rebalancing policy mix. Without fundamentally altering the underlying population distribution, these measures have advanced the equalization of public services and the convergence of per-capita welfare.