Over the past four decades of reform and opening up, China’s economy has maintained an impressive average annual growth rate of 9.2%, but there are prominent problems of unbalanced and uncoordinated regional economic development. As reflected in industrial development, there are huge differences in the industrial structure between regions. Theoretically, disparities in knowledge acquisition capabilities may result in unbalanced industrial growth among regions, consequently leading to unbalanced economic development at the regional level. Regional connections serve as a potential solution to break the path lock of local industrial development, then guiding the adjustment and upgrading of regional industrial structures. As a bridge connecting their place of origin and operation, how do regional chambers of commerce (RCoCs) affect the adjustment of regional industrial structures? Clarifying this issue is of paramount importance for promoting a rational division and collaboration of industries among regions and achieving coordinated regional economic development.

This paper manually collects data on RCoCs at the city level, and utilizes the DID method to investigate how RCoCs affect the direction of regional industrial structure adjustment, measured by the industrial structural similarity between pairs of cities based on the China Industrial Enterprise Database from 2000 to 2013. The Yangtze River Delta region, characterized by high economic development, openness, and chamber of commerce activity, serves as the primary research object. This paper finds that, on the whole, after the establishment of the RCoC, the industrial structure of its place of operation becomes similar to that of its place of origin in the preceding year. Mechanism analysis reveals that RCoCs facilitate knowledge diffusion in industries with comparative advantages by guiding enterprises to invest across regions, thereby promoting the convergence of industrial structures between the two places. However, certain cities also take into account the differences in resource endowments between the two places and compete in differentiated industries, leading to the divergence of industrial structures between cities. Furthermore, the convergence of industrial structures, driven by cross-city chambers of commerce, is desirable and conducive to the realization of coordinated economic development among cities. Expanding the scope of the study to the entire country, this paper finds that the establishment of out-of-town chambers of commerce between cities in the eastern region or the Yangtze River Basin contributes to the convergence of industrial structures between the two places.

The marginal contributions of this paper are as follows: First, it provides a novel explanation for the convergence of industrial structures between regions from the perspective of the formal social network of RCoCs. Second, it delves deeper into the impact and mechanism of municipal-level (rather than provincial-level) non-local chambers of commerce on the direction of urban industrial structure adjustment, thereby expanding the scope of research on the economic impact of RCoCs. Third, the conclusions have strong practical significance, and provide a theoretical foundation for leveraging non-local chambers of commerce as a means to promote the replication and diffusion of successful industrial development experiences between regions.