The reconfiguration of global production system after the financial crisis in 2008, as well as the long-term disproportionately economic growth among different regions in China, highlighted the importance of China’s new development pattern of “dual circulation” as a key strategy to promote high-quality economic development. Conducting a scientific industry relocation is the main approach to construct the “dual circulation”. As a result, the industry gradient coefficient (IGC) is increasingly adopted for supporting the decision making of industry relocation. This paper theoretically demonstrated that the IGC can be used to reveal the direction of industry relocation. After that, we adopted a new-proposed approach for testing its accuracy. We found that the first-order difference of IGC is a qualified indicator for reflecting the direction of industry relocation. Its accuracy is not affected by the time span or the relocation opposite to the changing of competitive advantages, but is mainly impacted by the hysteresis of relocation and the buffering effect for the industries with a huge advantage. On the other hand, the hysteresis of relocation grants the prediction ability for the industry gradient coefficient.