Abstract
The study aims to determine the drivers and barriers of blue growth success in Pakistan from the CPEC perspective. The study has collected 129 responses from the marine and CPEC officials to gain insightful knowledge and understanding of their opinion based on a seven-point Likert scale questionnaire and purposive-criterion sampling technique. The data analysis was conducted using PLS-SEM for estimating the validity and reliability of the model and hypothesis testing. The results showed that four critical barriers had been identified, including uncertainty avoidance, functional strategic focus, prioritization of the short-term growth (rather than long-term orientation), and weak innovativeness. However, the study has also identified that sustainability for businesses, balanced approach between stakeholders and shareholders, and top management commitment/support are major drivers towards blue growth in Pakistan from the CPEC perspective. After conducting the study, it is recommended to policymakers that long-term orientation, the correctness of the strategic focus, and a balanced approach should be mainly emphasized to optimize investment opportunities in CPEC for sustainable blue growth in Pakistan. Moreover, innovativeness should be focus primarily on improving the overall efficiency of CPEC and blue growth in Pakistan in the larger perspective. CPEC is a crucial aspect for blue growth in Pakistan, and therein, a dire need has been highlighted in the literature to undergo the barriers and drivers for blue growth from the CPEC perspective
Highlights
Ocean-based economic development has been identified as a renewed interest that can be termed in different ways: blue growth (BG), blue economy, and ocean economy
This analysis provides keen validation and reliability of the indicators and constructs based on factor loadings and their statistical significance, reliability estimations such as Cronbach’s alpha, and composite reliability (CR) and the inter-correlation between indicators to present their latent construct in the model based on average variance extracted (AVE)
Constructs have achieved convergent validity based on alpha, CR and AVE
Summary
Ocean-based economic development has been identified as a renewed interest that can be termed in different ways: blue growth (BG), blue economy, and ocean economy. High stocks are needed to be developed in blue life but with including the environmental concerns (Buck & Langan, 2017; Dalton et al, 2019) Another barrier is the lack of functional strategies that include gaps in maritime knowledge and data, lack of research efforts, lack of geopolitical combined efforts, lack of legislation, and adequate and skilled people. A few researchers have found a gap regarding this that could hinder the integration of blue growth within the oceans (Sadiq et al, 2021) Another gap in this topic is the lack of awareness regarding maritime activities, as prior research has not provided practical knowledge to fill this gap (Schultz-Zehden et al, 2019). The paper follows the literature review, methodology, results, and implications of the study while providing keen and vital future research directions
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