Abstract: Since the pilot negative list system practiced in Shanghai FTZ in 2013, the “negative list” has become one of the hottest economic phrases in recent years. By making use of the panel data of China’s 31 provinces (municipalities and autonomous regions) from 1997 to 2014 and the incident of the introduction of the Administrative Permission Law in 2004, this paper constructs a natural experiment to examine the relationship between the negative list and the industrial structure adjustment. The findings indicate that in general the negative list system is helpful to promote China’s industrial structure adjustment through incremental investments, but it is more in favor of providing a positive effect on the speed of the industrial structure adjustment, while the effect on the quality of the industrial structure adjustment is uncertain. When the deviation-share method is adopted to decompose the quality of industrial structure adjustment, it is found that the negative list is in favor of realizing the “structure-bonus” in the industrial structure adjustment through the incremental investment in the tertiary industry, but the “structure-burden” in the industrial structure adjustment cannot be thoroughly eliminated.

Key words: negative list; incremental investment; industrial re-structuring; DID