What Makes Residents Back a $62 Billion Corridor? Perceived Income, Not Promises

When China and Pakistan launched the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor in 2015, the promise was sweeping: a $62 billion network of roads, railways, pipelines, energy plants, and industrial zones linking Gwadar Port on the Arabian Sea to China’s Xinjiang region, widely billed as a paradigm shift for the Pakistani economy. A decade later, a new study published in Frontiers in Political Science asks a question that most corridor research has ignored — what do the people who actually live along the route think of it? The answer, drawn from 337 residents in cities spanning four provinces, is striking: public support for one of the world’s largest bilateral infrastructure projects hinges not on the concrete being poured, but on whether residents perceive that their incomes have risen.

The research, led by Waseem Ullah and Ya Li of Southwest Forestry University with colleagues at Yunnan University of Finance and Economics and Kunming University of Science and Technology, departs deliberately from the macroeconomic and geopolitical analyses that have dominated corridor scholarship. Regional inequality has long been identified as an underlying issue of the project, yet few studies have sought to hear directly from communities about their lived experiences of it. Using a bottom-up lens grounded in Social Exchange Theory — the idea that communities endorse a development project only when they believe its benefits outweigh its costs — the team tested how general support for the corridor relates to residents’ perceptions of employment, economic benefit, accessibility, rural development, and quality of life, and whether perceived income acts as the psychological link between them.

The technical execution was rigorous. Each construct was measured with validated multi-item scales rated on five-point Likert instruments, and the model was estimated using partial least squares structural equation modeling, a technique well suited to relatively small and non-normally distributed samples. Sample size adequacy was verified against the inverse square root method, which indicated a minimum of roughly 275 respondents for a path coefficient of 0.15 at 80 percent power; the final tally of 337 exceeded both that threshold and the conventional 10-times rule. Because the data were single-source self-reports, the team ran two safeguards against common method bias: Harman’s single-factor test, which found the largest factor accounted for just 42.53 percent of variance before rotation — well below the 50 percent concern threshold — and Kock’s full collinearity assessment, in which every indicator-level variance inflation factor fell below the conservative 3.3 cutoff.

The measurement model held up under scrutiny. All item loadings exceeded 0.60, average variance extracted surpassed 0.50 for every construct, and both Cronbach’s alpha and composite reliability cleared the 0.70 benchmark — with support for the corridor itself posting an alpha of 0.95. Discriminant validity was confirmed twice over: the Fornell-Larcker criterion, in which the square root of each construct’s average variance extracted exceeded its correlations with all others, and the heterotrait-monotrait ratio, with every construct pair falling below the 0.85 threshold. Overall model fit was solid, with a standardized root mean square residual of 0.069, comfortably within the conventional 0.08 limit.

Then came the results, and they split in an unexpected way. General corridor support was significantly associated with perceived income, perceived economic benefit, perceived rural development, and perceived quality of life. But its direct connections to perceived employment and perceived accessibility were not statistically significant — a puzzle, given that job creation and improved mobility are the corridor’s most heavily advertised dividends. The strongest direct path ran to rural development, with a coefficient of 0.796, while the path to employment was a negligible 0.013.

Perceived income, by contrast, predicted all five downstream outcomes without exception, with coefficients ranging from 0.100 for rural development to 0.744 for economic benefit. When the team computed bootstrapped indirect effects using 5,000 resamples with bias-corrected 95 percent confidence intervals, all five mediation pathways proved significant, with confidence intervals excluding zero in every case. The pattern suggests complementary partial mediation for economic benefit, rural development, and quality of life — where both direct and indirect paths matter — and indirect-only mediation for employment and accessibility, where the corridor’s perceived effects on residents’ judgments travel exclusively through the income channel.

Why would employment and accessibility behave differently? The authors point to an awareness-versus-outcome gap. Recent survey work in corridor-linked areas finds that residents’ knowledge, attitudes, and practices vary substantially by region, and that limited awareness of concrete project benefits may weaken the translation of general project awareness into specific outcome perceptions. In Balochistan, perceptions appear historically and socio-economically rooted, with limited awareness of the corridor’s benefits feeding low trust and weakened cooperation; in Gilgit-Baltistan, attitudes are shaped more by immediate perceived needs and regional cultural distinctiveness. Residents of mountainous construction zones such as Mansehra and Abbottabad have reported disruption from blasting noise and environmental concerns tied to land clearance and deforestation, while employment within Chinese-affiliated firms has been constrained by language barriers — particularly the lack of Mandarin proficiency.

The authors are careful about what the cross-sectional design can and cannot establish. Because the data cannot determine temporal ordering, the findings are interpreted as statistical associations consistent with the proposed model rather than a demonstrated causal sequence — Social Exchange Theory conventionally allows the reverse possibility, in which perceived benefits precede and contribute to project support. What the study does demonstrate, the team argues, is the lived experience of disadvantaged communities affected by the corridor, something objective economic data cannot capture. Prior research had largely treated perceived benefit as a single, undifferentiated construct; testing perceived income as a specific mediating mechanism represents one of the first such analyses in the corridor literature.

The policy implications are pointed. If income is the channel through which public goodwill flows, then interventions designed to sustain support should make income gains concrete, visible, and explicitly linked to the project — transparent reporting on local hiring, wage growth, and job creation, rather than abstract promises of generalized benefit. Existing programs offer a blueprint: on the Peshawar–Karachi Motorway, the largest transport project under the corridor, roughly 97 percent of the construction labor force is Pakistani, directly contributing to household incomes in underdeveloped areas. The authors call for coordinated policy that pairs job creation with fair local content rules, community participation in decision-making, and strong environmental protections, framing the corridor’s long-term success as dependent on grassroots legitimacy won through shared prosperity and justice-driven governance rather than growth statistics alone.

Limitations temper the headline findings. Snowball and social-media sampling — adopted because formal population lists for remote corridor communities in Balochistan and Gilgit-Baltistan are incomplete and security constraints limit conventional random access — carries an inherent risk of selection bias, limiting statistical generalizability. The single-source, cross-sectional design cannot establish causality, and the study measured only perceived benefits, leaving environmental and other sensitive social effects unexplored. Future work, the authors suggest, should compare competing model directions with longitudinal or experimental designs, disaggregate general support into social, political, and security dimensions, add qualitative depth, and include other stakeholders — including the Chinese public, whose government supplies most of the investment. As the corridor’s second decade unfolds, the study’s central message endures: megaprojects earn community backing not through infrastructure alone, but through the everyday perception that lives are tangibly, visibly improving.

Subject of Research: Infrastructure projects and sustainable development: support of the local residents (a case of China–Pakistan economic corridor)

Article Title: Infrastructure projects and sustainable development: support of the local residents (a case of China–Pakistan economic corridor)

Article References: Ullah, W., Li, Y., Arshad, M., & Hussain, A. (2026). Infrastructure projects and sustainable development: support of the local residents (a case of China–Pakistan economic corridor). Frontiers in Political Science, 8, Article 1842515. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2026.1842515

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fpos.2026.1842515

Keywords: China–Pakistan Economic Corridor, CPEC, Belt and Road Initiative, infrastructure megaprojects, perceived income, social exchange theory, community perceptions, sustainable development, regional inequality, Pakistan, PLS-SEM, public support