This paper takes the industrial poverty alleviation of local state-owned enterprises in China as the research object, and takes the local state-owned enterprises listed in Shanghai and Shenzhen A shares in China from 2016 to 2020 as the sample to empirically test the impact of industrial poverty alleviation on the sustainable economic growth of the region and consider the regulatory effect of digital innovation. This study found that China’s local industrial poverty reduction behavior in state-owned enterprises can effectively promote regional economic growth. Moreover, the digital innovation produced a regulating effect; that is, if enterprises carry out digital innovation and have a higher degree of digital innovation, their industrial poverty alleviation behavior will have a stronger role in promoting regional economic growth. This conclusion still holds even after controlling for factors of robustness and endogeneity. In addition, the study of influence mechanisms found that the proportion of primary industry in GDP was the mediating effect of industrial poverty alleviation on regional economic growth, and the proportion of primary industry in GDP had a partial mediating effect. Further heterogeneous group testing shows that the impact of industrial poverty alleviation on regional economically sustainable growth is more obvious in agriculture-related, local state-owned enterprises; non-high-tech, local state-owned enterprises; and local state-owned enterprises with subsequent poverty alleviation plans. The empirical evidence in this paper verifies the role of local state-owned enterprises’ participation in industrial poverty alleviation in promoting regional economic growth. It is a useful supplement to the research literature on the economic consequences of Chinese enterprises’ participation in targeted poverty alleviation, which helps to better understand such a phenomenon and also provides a powerful explanation for China’s poverty alleviation achievements.
