¶ … Pakistan and China Infrastructural Development and Labor Availability in Pakistan

Pakistan is a third-world predominantly Muslim republic located in the Continent of Asia between longitudes 610 and 75.450E and latitudes 23.30 and 36.450 N. It borders China in the north, Afghanistan in the north-west, India in the east, Iran in the west, and the Arabian Sea in the south. It covers a total land area of 796, 096 sq. km, with a population of around 130 million, more than two-thirds of which lives in the rural areas.

Fig 1: the Geographical Location of Pakistan (source: infoplease.com)

Its strategic location:

Makes it a center of the Muslim world -- to the east lies Bangladesh and a stream of other Muslim countries, to the north lies six Muslim countries that gained their independence from Russia in the 1990s, and to the west lies Iran, Afghanistan, and a chain of Muslim republics spreading through the Middle East into Africa.

Grants it control over the Arabian Sea, and consequently, the industrial progress of the West, whose countries obtain most of their oil from the Gulf states and ship the same through the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean

iii) Grants it control over international trade in the region -- since most of Russia' seas are snow-capped for the better part of the year, the Arabian Sea, with its warm waters, basically drives regional trade

State of Transport Infrastructure

Transport infrastructure in Pakistan has shown significant improvement over the years; however, it still remains relatively deficient compared to other countries such as China, Japan, Russia, and Saudi Arabia (Vision 2030 Planning Commission, 2008). The situation is even worse in the...

Fig 2 below shows the percentage of Pakistan's rural population that lacked access to an efficient road network between 2001 and 2002.
Fig 2: Lack of Access to Paved and Motorable Roads in Rural Pakistan by Quintile (2001-02 PIHS)

Figure 2: percentage of rural population lacking access

(Source: Essakalli, 2005, p. 4)

Currently, there is only 97,881 km of road serving rural Pakistan, compared to 157,975 km serving its cities. These disparities in infrastructural development have largely been attributed to the rural-urban divide that has led policymakers to continually focus on improving the infrastructural position of urban areas at the expense of rural areas. Pakistan's economy is driven primarily by agriculture, and the current state of physical infrastructure makes it difficult to ship agricultural produce to the cities. Rural-urban migration continues to be a fundamental social problem. The government expects the urban population to rise by around 80 million by 2030. Infrastructural development is, however, not growing at the same pace. With such high population growth rates, multilane road networks and flyovers are necessary; however, these are almost non-existent, making traffic jams prevalent, and the distribution of tradable commodities a huge challenge (see images below obtained from Google.com).

(Source: Google.Com; Traffic Jam in Lahore City, Pakistan)

Labor Availability: Pakistan has a relatively high unemployment rate, 15.4% to be precise. This…