Entrepreneurial Factors Affecting Perceived China Pakistan Economic Corridor’s Socioeconomic Sustainability: An Empirical Study in Pakistan

Abstract

This study aimed and contributed to the discipline of entrepreneurship, and economic corridors by investigating various observed and unobserved entrepreneurial factors i.e., entrepreneur’s opportunities recognition, entrepreneurs trusting beliefs on Government, entrepreneurs startup behavior, and transparency. Govt. of Pakistan faced a problem like lack of trust of manufacturing entrepreneurs on Govt. initiatives due which a national level negative perception is witnessed about socioeconomic sustainability due to CPEC in Pakistan. This study proposed to analyze the impact of different entrepreneurial factors on perceived socioeconomic sustainability in the manufacturing organizations to overcome the problem. This study followed positivism paradigm, deductive approach, survey strategy, simple random sampling, and quantitative methodology. Primary data was collected from 400 industrial entrepreneurs through physical and online channels. Data was collected on two different point off times by using time-lag strategy to avoid common method bias. After data screening, this study used 344 valid responses for data analysis. Measurement scales were adapted from previous studies. This study applied exploratory factor analysis, and confirmatory factor analysis for factor analysis and structural equational modeling for hypothesis testing. Moreover, Preachers and Hayes MEDTHREE PROCESS MACRO was applied for mediation, moderation, and moderated mediation analysis. All the nine proposed hypothesis have been accepted by drawing upon multi-attribute decision making approach, social exchange theory, social interaction theory and social network theory. This study contributed to the body of knowledge by filling the content gap in entrepreneurship and economic corridors literature by testing a direct link between opportunity recognition and trusting beliefs. This study is amongst the first few studies that analyzed the indirect impact of trusting beliefs between opportunity recognition and perceived socio-economic sustainability, and indirect impact of startup behavior between trusting beliefs and perceived socioeconomic sustainability. This study also contributed to the policymakers, Government officials, entrepreneurs and researchers that at low and medium level of transparency, Pakistani entrepreneurs are able to take the decision of investments for new startup under CPEC initiatives and Government of Pakistan need to avoid high level of transparency.