How to improve the government-enterprise relationships to retain enterprise?

How can enterprises and governments establish and improve government-enterprise relationships (GER) to increase the efficiency of business operations and enterprise retention (ER), and ensure the sustainable development of enterprises and regional economies? Based on resource dependence theory and institutional theory, from the enterprise level and the institutional level, GER is composed of five elements: organisational political strategy, individual political strategy, government fairness, government service, government convenience. This article studies the multiple paths and the mechanism of the coupling of the five elements of GER to achieve high ER. Fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) and the data of GER in China's 31 provinces from 2010 to 2019 were used to conduct configuration analysis and the causal relationship between multiple factors of GER and ER. Sixteen thousand eight hundred fifty-four observations of Chinese A-share listed companies are used to conduct an empirical analysis of corporate political strategy on enterprise retention willingness in government business environment, and to test the robustness of the configuration analysis results. Results indicate that a single factor of GER is not a necessary condition to produce high ER, four types of GER configurations (Government-driven government-enterprise separation, enterprise-driven government-enterprise separation, government-and-enterprise-driven government-enterprise cooperation, government-assisted government-enterprise separation) can produce high ER, and three kinds of GER that produce non-high ER are obtained. The empirical analysis of listed companies tested the configuration analysis results and robustness.