Analysis of industrial transformation and upgrading in resource-exhausted cities: evidence from city-level and enterprise-level panel data.

Massive and irrational exploitation of natural resources promoted the industrialization process, which formed different categories of resource-based cities. Although these cities have made dramatic contributions to socio-economic development in the last two decades, they are now facing grave problems due to resource depletion. Industrial transformation and upgrading are the only ways to cope with this situation. Therefore, this study utilizes the city-level and enterprise-level data to analyze the industrial transformation and upgrading of resource-exhausted cities in China. Both the macro- and micro-empirical results demonstrate that the central policy of the State Council has a positive feedback on industrial transformation. Then the findings of baseline regression are validated by robustness and heterogeneity tests. What’s more, the policy facilitates industrial upgrading by promoting transition to technology-intensive and high-value chain industries. Finally, we propose relevant implications for industrial transformation on the basis of the main findings.