Pairing assistance program is an important regional development strategy in China, as well as an important measure to consolidate poverty alleviation achievements and comprehensively promote rural revitalization. In this paper, 19 provinces and municipalities paired up to help Xinjiang as a quasi-natural experiment. Based on the county-level panel data of the four prefectures in southern Xinjiang from 2005 to 2019, this paper identifies the promoting effect of the corresponding support policies on the self-development capacity of the four prefectures in southern Xinjiang by using the difference-in-differences method. The results show that the pairing assistance policy has significantly improved the self-development ability of the four prefectures in southern Xinjiang, but there is a certain time lag in the implementation of the policy effect. Until 2015, the policy has significantly promoted the four aspects of self-development ability of the four prefectures in southern Xinjiang. At the same time, due to the differences in economic foundation, factor endowment and other aspects of the counties in the four prefectures of southern Xinjiang, the effects of pairing assistance policies are not the same. In counties with high self-development ability, pairing assistance policies have a significant positive effect on the improvement of self-development ability, while in the counties with low self-development ability, the effect of the pairing assistance policies are not obvious.
