Abstract: The Yangtze River Economic Belt is the most potential economic region in China. How to give full play to the role of the Yangtze golden waterway, promote the industrial division of labor, cooperation and orderly transfer, and accelerate the integrated development of the Yangtze River Economic Belt has become an important issue to promote the high-quality development of the Yangtze River Economic Belt. What kind of policies the government makes and how effective the policies are will be crucial to the integrated development of the Yangtze River Economic Belt. A multi-regional CGE model of China's Yangtze River economic belt is built with the database of 2012 interregional input-output table, and it is used to quantitatively simulate the impacts of different potential policies (reduce transportation costs, promote industrial spatial transfer, and mixed policy) for the integration of the Yangtze River Economic Belt, on the regional economy and the integration within the Yangtze River Economic Belt. The results show that:(1) Enhancing the east-west land transportation construction and reducing the transportation cost in the Yangtze River Economic Belt will facilitate the development of integration within the Yangtze River Economic Belt. The Yangtze River Delta and Sichuan will benefit significantly, while Chongqing will suffer a lot because of severer competition. (2) By implementation of different taxing rate across regions to enhance industrial spatial transfer, heavy chemical industry transfer can be promoted from the Yangtze River Delta with limited environmental bearing capacity to Chongqing-Sichuan and other upstream and middle stream regions. As a result, the income gap will narrow but economic integration effect in the Yangtze River Economic Belt will be not improved. (3) By combined use of abovementioned two policy, industry spatial transfer can be promoted while negative influence for less-developed area can be decreased, which contributes to the integration development and income gap reduction in the Yangtze River Economic Belt. Therefore, to boost the integration development in the Yangtze River Economic Belt, it is necessary to promote industrial space reconstruction while strengthening transportation infrastructure construction. Spatially differentiated tax policy can be adopted to encourage industrial transfer, and industrial chains and clusters can be developed in the central and western regions. At the same time, the environmental risk of industrial transfer should be well controlled. The research results of this paper can provide important theoretical reference and decision support for the policy-making of the integrated development of the Yangtze River Economic Belt.

Key words: Yangtze River Economic Belt, regional economic integration, multi-regional computable general equilibrium model, transportation cost, industrial transfer