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The paper aims to identify the determinants of employment in Pakistan. In light of the jobless growth Pakistan has experienced starting from 2000, this is a valid concern. The paper discusses the structural relationship between employment and growth in Pakistan and analyzes it empirically within an economic geography framework.

The paper applies a Logit regression analysis to data from Pakistan Social and Living Standard Measurement Survey for the years 2010, 2012 and 2014. While this survey is published annually, the paper uses data at the district level, which is available only every alternate year. Data are collected at the individual level and can be mapped back to the household level. Each wave of data covers at least 70,000 households. The survey provides data on employment status, health, education, sanitation, economic situation and asset ownership. The analysis is conducted using Stata. The paper uses computer vision to present and trace changing employment patterns in Pakistan over time. To do so, the paper uses MATLAB. The data are transformed to KMV format and the plotting is done using Google Earth.

The paper shows how household characteristics affect the odds of employment in Pakistan, finding evidence of provincial disparities. Moreover, the paper shows that non-wage income from assets reduces the odds of being employed. The paper identifies the various income thresholds for the five income sources examined to have an impact on the odds of employment.

The novelty of this research is the identification of the determinants of employment in Pakistan and their analysis from the perspective of economic geography. This paper should be useful for policymakers and international financial organizations concerned with structural change in Pakistan.

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) – the modern equivalent of the historic Silk Route – will connect China to multiple countries in Asia, Africa, and Europe through a complex web of land and sea routes. As a pilot project of a network of this magnitude, the 62 billion dollar China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) has far-reaching implications for future bilateral agreements with other countries along the routes, and for geopolitics in the region. This chapter will analyze CPEC along the following key strands of inquiry: Pakistan’s internal political economy, her macroeconomic stability, and an analysis of the corridor’s long-term impact.

While the literature on corridors is extensive, it does not give us a unifying theory with which to gauge the effectiveness of CPEC, which is more than an economic endeavor. In order to truly understand the dynamics of the region, the authors examine the extent to which domestic support for the CPEC may impact the whole initiative, and how the deficiencies in local infrastructure may take away from its success.

In as much as it is contested, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is also unexplored, underdiscussed, and, as a result, misunderstood. Frequently viewed through the lens of international relations and global economy, the diverse dimensions of collaboration, including business and research-industry clusters, that BRI enhances, tend to be excluded from the analysis. In a similar manner, the role of the Arab Peninsula in the grand strategy underpinning BRI and its implementation is rarely discussed. BRI is a forward-oriented initiative, an attempt to reap benefits of developments and circumstances that are only nascent. This bears two potent implications. First, as China attempts to influence the context in which it operates, it is subject to change itself; the Chinese business sector evolution attests to that. Second, some of China’s not so obvious partners of today, including those in the Arab Peninsula, are about to turn into key interlocutors of tomorrow. BRI taps into opportunities thus created. This chapter elaborates on these issues and, against this backdrop, outlines how the remaining chapters included in this volume add to this discussion.