As the foundation of modern economic development, industry is the engine of industrialized and urbanized development. Industrial ecology is a high-level form of industry that is achieved after it has reached a certain stage, which guides the coordinated industrial development balancing mankind and nature. The implementation of industrial ecology is an important method and effective approach to realize the sustainable development of industrialization and urbanization. In this article, based on the inter-provincial panel data of western China during 2003-2018, the spatial development trends of industrialization, urbanization and industrial ecology are analyzed, and an empirical method is employed to conduct a robustness test based on the Panel Vector Auto-Regression (PVAR) model to determine the long-term interactions among these three aspects. The results show that it is difficult to manifest the short-term causal relationships among industrialization, urbanization and industrial ecology. After lagging for three periods, they present the Granger causality, the industrial ecology and industrialization have promoted urbanization, and the coefficient for the influence of industrial ecology on urbanization is 0.4612. However, industrialization and urbanization have negative impacts on industrial ecology, and with a 1% increase in industrialization or urbanization, the industrial ecology will decline by 0.2261% or 0.2850%, respectively. With the continuation of the lagging period, industrial ecology will have better interpretability than industrialization and urbanization, and industrialization and eco-friendly development have strong self-accumulation development mechanisms, while the self-accumulation mechanism of urbanization is not obvious, and it might even have a decline. By fulfilling the role of the regional leading industry, the state of unbalanced internal development can be improved, so as to realize mutual promotion between industrialization and urbanization. By improving the utilization rates of resources and energy, efforts should be made to implement green production, significantly promote industrial ecology, and boost high-quality development of both the regional economy and society.