About Economic Geography

Economic Geography

Economic Geography (经济地理, Jingji Dili) is a Chinese-language academic journal of economic geography published in Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province. It was founded in 1981 and is sponsored by the Geographical Society of China together with the Hunan Academy of Social Sciences. The journal carries ISSN 1000-8462, publishes through its official website at jjdl.com.cn, and is a source journal of the Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index (CSSCI). Its coverage spans regional economics, urban and rural development, tourism geography and spatial planning, making it China's specialist national journal for the geographical study of economic activity.

A disambiguation is essential for international readers. This Changsha journal is not the journal Economic Geography owned by Clark University in the United States, which was founded in 1925, carries ISSN 0013-0095 and publishes in English. The two journals share an English title because both are named for the same sub-discipline. The Chinese journal is identified by ISSN 1000-8462, by its Chinese title 经济地理, by its Changsha base and by its sponsors, the Geographical Society of China and the Hunan Academy of Social Sciences.

Founding in 1981 and the Changsha base

The journal was founded in 1981. Its volume numbering confirms the date arithmetically: Volume 46 appeared in 2026, which is the forty-sixth annual volume of a journal that began in 1981, and the July 2026 number was Issue 7 of that volume, published on 26 July 2026 — a pattern consistent with monthly publication. A journal that has appeared monthly, without a break in its volume sequence, for more than four decades has a substantial archive behind it.

The founding date places the journal at the very beginning of China's reform era. Economic geography — the study of where economic activity locates, how regions develop unevenly, and how space shapes production, trade and livelihoods — acquired urgent practical relevance as China began restructuring its economy after 1978. Decisions about industrial location, regional development strategy, urban growth and rural change were being taken at every level of government, and a national journal dedicated to the geography of those questions, founded in 1981, was positioned to publish the research that informed and evaluated them.

Its base in Changsha also matters. Most of China's national geography journals are published in Beijing, where the Chinese Academy of Sciences' geography institute and the Geographical Society of China are headquartered. Economic Geography is instead anchored in a provincial academy of social sciences — the Hunan Academy of Social Sciences — while retaining a national society as co-sponsor. That arrangement gives the journal a national remit and authorship with an institutional home outside the capital, in a major city of central China, a region whose urban agglomerations and rural transformation the journal frequently studies.

Sponsors: a national society and a provincial academy

The journal's sponsorship pairs the Geographical Society of China with the Hunan Academy of Social Sciences. The Society is the discipline's national learned body, and its sponsorship connects the journal to the nationwide community of geographers, including the economic geography specialists concentrated in universities and Chinese Academy of Sciences institutes. The Hunan Academy of Social Sciences is the provincial government's comprehensive social science research institution in Hunan, and it provides the journal's editorial home in Changsha.

This dual sponsorship is a common and durable pattern in Chinese academic publishing: a national society supplies disciplinary legitimacy and a national pool of authors and reviewers, while a host institution supplies the editorial office, staff and continuity. For readers assessing the journal, the pairing explains both its national standing — including its CSSCI source status, discussed below — and its strong coverage of central China subjects, where its home institution's regional expertise is greatest.

Scope: the geography of economic activity

The journal's directory description defines its scope as regional economics, urban and rural development, tourism geography and spatial planning. Each of those four labels corresponds to a substantial body of published work.

Regional economics, in the journal's usage, means the geographical analysis of regional development: why some regions grow faster than others, how industries cluster and move, how cities form agglomerations and networks, and how national regional strategies play out across space. Urban and rural development covers the growth and internal structure of cities, urban agglomerations and metropolitan areas, the transformation of the countryside, urban-rural integration, and the land-use consequences of both. Tourism geography examines the spatial organisation of tourism — destinations, flows, and the industry's effects on places. Spatial planning connects the other three to practice: the territorial spatial plans through which Chinese government organises land use, ecological protection and development.

Recent issues show this scope in concrete form. A 2026 issue carried a study, based on geopotential theory, of how the Belt and Road Initiative changed the strength of geo-economic linkages between China and participating countries from 2010 to 2021; a study of how extreme precipitation affects China's agricultural economic output, using county-level economic and meteorological data for 2000–2021; and an analysis of the low-carbon utilisation efficiency of urban land in the urban agglomerations of the middle reaches of the Yangtze River, which found a core-periphery pattern with Wuhan, Changsha and Nanchang as cores. Other recent articles have mapped the spatial evolution of China's new energy vehicle industry across 282 prefecture-level cities, studied the siting and spatial adaptability of electric vehicle charging stations within Changsha's Third Ring Road, and reviewed the formation of China's "3+N" regional strategic framework. Industry location, infrastructure, land efficiency, agriculture under climate change and national regional strategy — the journal's declared scope, in action.

Regional development as a core theme

Regional development runs through the journal's history as its central question. The review of China's regional strategic framework published in its pages describes how the country has built a structure of three core strategies — the coordinated regional development strategy, the major regional strategies, and the major function zoning strategy — supplemented by further strategies, and analyses how these strategies overlap and interact in particular places. That kind of stock-taking article is characteristic of the journal: it treats national policy as a spatial phenomenon, to be mapped, measured and evaluated geographically.

The same concern appears at smaller scales. County-level studies in recent issues examine how the agglomeration and diffusion of production factors drive urban-rural integration across more than 1,700 county-level units, and metropolitan studies examine how the development strategy of territorial space should be optimised in growing metropolitan areas such as Changsha-Zhuzhou-Xiangtan. From national strategy down to the county, the journal's regional work asks a consistent set of questions: where does activity concentrate, what does that concentration do to the places gaining and losing, and how should planning respond?

Tourism geography, one of the journal's declared fields, belongs to this regional picture as well, since tourism is a development strategy for many Chinese regions and a force that reshapes local economies and landscapes. By publishing tourism research alongside industrial and urban research, the journal treats tourism as one sector among others in a region's economic geography, rather than as a separate leisure literature.

CSSCI status and standing in Chinese social science

Economic Geography is a CSSCI source journal. The Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index, developed at Nanjing University, is the principal citation index for Chinese social science and humanities journals, and source-journal status within it is the standard marker of a leading Chinese social science title. For a journal that sits on the boundary between geography and economics, CSSCI inclusion is significant: it certifies the journal within the social sciences, where much of its readership in regional economics, planning and policy research is based.

Directory descriptions likewise identify it as a leading specialist title — the Chinese-language journal of record for economic geography as a sub-discipline. China has many journals that publish economic geography papers, including the comprehensive geography journals of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, but a dedicated journal, sponsored by the national geographical society, whose entire remit is the spatial organisation of the economy, occupies a distinct position. Authors working on industrial location, regional inequality, urban systems and tourism know that this journal's readers are their specialist peers.

That specialist identity also explains the journal's longevity. Founded just as China's economic transformation created a permanent demand for regional analysis, and retaining CSSCI status through successive evaluation rounds, Economic Geography has been carried by the continuing importance of its subject: every new phase of Chinese development — coastal opening, western development, urban agglomeration building, the Belt and Road Initiative, low-carbon transition — has generated a new wave of economic-geographical questions for it to publish.

Publication pattern and the online journal

The journal publishes monthly, with volumes running by calendar year: Volume 46 covers 2026, and its seventh issue was published in late July of that year. Its official website, jjdl.com.cn, presents the journal in both Chinese and English interfaces — the English pages carry the journal's ISSN-based address (1000-8462) and present current-issue contents and most-viewed article lists with English titles and abstracts. That bilingual presentation is how most Chinese journals now address international readers: the articles are in Chinese, but their existence, subjects and findings are discoverable in English.

Digital economy and new research fronts

The website's most-viewed lists give a reader a quick sense of the journal's active fronts. Alongside the articles already mentioned, recent highly viewed work has examined topics such as the impact of online attention on urban development, using panel data from 283 prefecture-level and above cities — a sign that the journal now regularly publishes work on the digital economy's spatial effects, a theme its 1981 founders could not have foreseen but which fits its founding question of how economic activity organises itself in space.

How to distinguish and cite the journal

Because two journals share the title Economic Geography, accurate citation practice matters. References to the Changsha journal should carry its ISSN 1000-8462 or its Chinese title 经济地理, and its articles are cited by volume and year in a sequence that begins in 1981 — a 2026 article is in Volume 46. References to the Clark University journal carry ISSN 0013-0095 and a volume sequence beginning in 1925. Confusing the two corrupts bibliographies and bibliometric records, and the risk is real because abstracting services index both.

For the researcher, the practical route into the Chinese journal is its official site, where current issues, article abstracts and the journal's own presentation of its scope and sponsors are available. Its CSSCI listing provides a second, independent confirmation of its identity and standing within the Chinese social science journal system.

In summary, Economic Geography is a monthly, CSSCI-indexed, Chinese-language journal, founded in 1981 in Changsha, sponsored by the Geographical Society of China and the Hunan Academy of Social Sciences, and devoted to regional economics, urban and rural development, tourism geography and spatial planning. For more than four decades it has been the specialist national forum in which Chinese scholars analyse how their country's economy is arranged in space — and how that arrangement might be planned better.