Will the “Pairing Assistance” Policy Trigger the Migration of Polluting Enterprises? An Empirical Study Based on the Yangtze River Delta Region

The migration of polluting enterprises and its mechanism are a recent research hotspot in enterprise geography and environmental economic geography. This paper finds that the “Pairing Assistance” policy (PAP) is an important driving force for the migration of polluting enterprises (MPE), which is widely ignored by the existing research. Based on the perspective of inter-regional correlations, this paper establishes an analytical framework for the MPE. The negative binomial regression model was used to conduct a big data analysis on enterprises based on the Qichacha database. The main findings are as follows. (1) The average number of polluting enterprises migrating between cities with a PAP relationship is 129.51% more than that between other cities. (2) This policy can also promote the MPE from cities that are not in a PAP relationship with cities that receive assistance from the policy. The average frequency of these cities accepting polluting enterprises was 63.76% more than that of other cities. (3) Heterogeneity analysis shows that under the influence of the policy, highly polluting and low-tech enterprises mainly migrated from developed regions to less-developed regions. (4) The mechanism mainly includes lower environmental regulations, operating costs, inter-regional differences in industrial upgrading, and the easiness for polluting enterprises to adapt into the network of government–enterprise relationships in the assistance-accepting cities. This paper, based on China’s empirical research, provides a new mechanism for the migration of polluting enterprises