Abstract:More than half of the cities in the Yellow River Basin are resource-based cities. The coordinated development of such cities in ecology and industry is of great significance to promote high-quality development in the Yellow River Basin. This study takes environmental regulation and industrial enterprise data as samples, uses panel threshold model, entropy method, and other methods to classify resource-based cities in the Yellow River Basin based on resource endowment differentiation, analyzes resource endowment, environmental regulation, and industrial pathways to create multi-element interaction, the role relationship, scientific summary of the impact of environmental regulations on the creation of industrial pathways under high-, middle-, and low-level resource endowments, and then put forward high-quality development recommendations for resource-based cities under different levels of resource endowment. The results show that the level of urban environmental regulation in the Yellow River Basin increased significantly from 2003 to 2016, and the gap between regions continued to shrink, generally showing a gradual increase in the upstream, middle, and lower reaches. The resource-based (non-resource) industry in the resource-based cities of the Yellow River Basin from 2003 to 2013, the level of path creation has improved significantly but the regional differences are significant. Under different resource endowment conditions, the impact of environmental regulations on the path creation of resource industries and non-resource industry is significantly different. Therefore, the formulation and selection of environmental policies must consider the local resource endowment conditions and the degree of dependence of economic development on the resource industry, scientifically design the environmental regulatory policy system, and give full play to the role of environmental regulation in promoting ecological protection and industrial transformation of resource-based cities in the Yellow River Basin.