Dr. Aman Ullah, the Chief Economist for Planning and Development Department of Government of Punjab spoke to the audience on Friday, December 22, 2017 at the Suleman Dawood School of Business. Dr Aman is the Focal Person of Government of the Punjab for Sustainable Development Goals, China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), Punjab Growth Strategy and Ease of Doing Business Reform Agenda. He is also supervising the Punjab Economic Research Institute (PERI) and Punjab Bureau of Statistics. Dr Aman spoke about the “The Impact of CPEC on Pakistan’s Industrial Sector”. He emphasized on the part of China’s greater initiative “One Belt-One Road”, that is approximately a 3,000-kilometre network of roads, pipelines and railways to transport goods from Gwadar port in Pakistan to Kashgar in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of China. Dr Aman said that the $46 billion project intends to rapidly modernize Pakistan’s infrastructure, improve energy ecosystem and establish special economic zones. He also highlighted that CPEC is not just a transit route for Chinese exports, rather entails an elaborate plan to overcome economic issues such as unemployment, the energy crisis, the underdevelopment of national infrastructure and the overall external economic dependency by building capacity in these sectors. He said that the key component of CPEC is the Industrial cooperation which envisions to fully benefit from the demographic and natural endowment of the country and enhancing its industrial capability through creation of new industrial clusters, while balancing the regional socioeconomic development, enhancing people’s wellbeing, and promoting domestic peace and stability.
