Under the background of “heavy chemical industries encircling the river” in the Yangtze River economic zone, in order to give consideration to both environmental restoration and economic development at the same time, we take the input-output analysis as reference to write this paper. This paper analyzes the overall characteristics of regional division, pollution and economy, using the panel data of 11 provinces and cities in the Yangtze River economic zone from 2005 to 2016. What’s more, we employ the spatial panel Durbin model to investigate the dual effects of heavy chemical industry’s division level on both the regional environmental pollution and the economic development. The result shows that the midstream economic belt has got rid of the upstream role of regional division, and kept getting closer to the downstream zone. The division of heavy chemical industry, environmental pollution and economic development are spatially dependent. The reduction of the heavy chemical industry’s division level in the midstream and upstream economic belt promotes the decline of regional pollution level, and the “pollution transfer” doesn’t happen along with the change of heavy chemical industry inside the economic zone. The division’s weakening will lead to an increase of the proportion of economic scale in the economic belt.
