Abstract:  The researches on the industrial upgrading in the existing economics literature focus more on the macro level. Representative theories include unbalanced growth theory asserting that industrial upgrading is driven by demand and supply and new structural economics asserting that industrial upgrading is driven by the upgrading of endowment structure, which can be summarized as Engel Law, Baumohl Law and Lin Yifu Law. However, most researches on industrial upgrading have focused on the substitution effect and the income effect, without a thorough and holistic understanding of the practical process of industrial upgrading at the enterprise level. Most important of all, the dynamic core competence of an enterprise should be given a top priority, which in turn takes viability as a necessary condition, that is, the match of the resource endowment structure of the enterprise with its value chain structure. To conduct an in-depth research on the micro-industrial upgrading mechanism based on the viability of enterprises, we can draw strengths from both economics literature which lays more emphasis on theoretical mechanisms and management literature which is more practice-oriented, thus obtaining a better position to understand the world and conduct practice with guide.

Key words: Key words： industrial upgrading, viability of enterprises, enterprise endowment structure, enterprise value chain, new structural economics