Abstract:
As part of the massive One Belt One Road (OBOR) project or ‘New Silk
Road’ the governments of China and Pakistan have announced that a significant
‘corridor’ will be constructed in Pakistan. This paper looks in detail at the $46 billion
China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) package of transport, energy and
manufacturing projects and asks how we can analyse the impact of a transformative
expansion of infrastructure. This paper draws lessons from various old-fashioned
economics including Rostow, Hirschman and others and the historical case studies
of transformative infrastructure expansion in the nineteenth century United States,
Mexico, Germany and India to explore the conditions under which CPEC could
promote sustainable long-run economic growth in Pakistan.
