China-Pakistan economic corridor and its impact on rural development and human life sustainability. Observations from rural women

Ahmad Saad; Mariah Ijaz; Muhammad Usman Asghar; Liu Yamin

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0239546

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionApril 28, 2020
29 May 2020 Decision Letter - Bing Xue, Editor PONE-D-20-12198 China-Pakistan Economic Corridor and its Impact on Rural Development and Human Life Sustainability; Observations from Rural Women PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Anwar, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. Please submit your revised manuscript by Jul 13 2020 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript: A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'. A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'. An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'. If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter. If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript. Kind regards, Bing Xue, Ph.D. Academic Editor PLOS ONE Journal Requirements: 1. When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf 2. Please change "female” or "male" to "woman” or "man" as appropriate, when used as a noun. 3. Please provide additional details regarding participant consent. 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For more information, see our copyright guidelines: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/licenses-and-copyright. We require you to either (1) present written permission from the copyright holder to publish these figures specifically under the CC BY 4.0 license, or (2) remove the figures from your submission: 1. You may seek permission from the original copyright holder of Figure(s) [4,7] to publish the content specifically under the CC BY 4.0 license. We recommend that you contact the original copyright holder with the Content Permission Form (http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=7c09/content-permission-form.pdf) and the following text: “I request permission for the open-access journal PLOS ONE to publish XXX under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CCAL) CC BY 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Please be aware that this license allows unrestricted use and distribution, even commercially, by third parties. 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To do this, go to ‘Update my Information’ (in the upper left-hand corner of the main menu), and click on the Fetch/Validate link next to the ORCID field. This will take you to the ORCID site and allow you to create a new iD or authenticate a pre-existing iD in Editorial Manager. Please see the following video for instructions on linking an ORCID iD to your Editorial Manager account: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xcclfuvtxQ 9. Please upload a copy of Figure 14, to which you refer in your text on page 18. If the figure is no longer to be included as part of the submission please remove all reference to it within the text. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Partly Reviewer #2: Partly ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: No ****** 3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: No ****** 5. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: The research topic and the overall idea is a very interesting one to say the least. CPEC and potential rural development is surely an important area when considering the successful achievement of SDGs. I have some questions and suggestions in regards to the submitted manuscript which are as follows: Rural women have been the main focus in this research. The educational background provided by the authors suggests that there are 0.7% PhDs and 22.51% Masters/MS/M Phil while another 23.5% has Bachelor degree. According to the data presented in Table 1, about 45% of the women have a Bachelor degree or higher. This is an unusually highly educated population of women especially in a rural, under-developed settings. In Pakistan, such high level of education among women is a rarity even in urban areas and can only be seen in major cities. I believe that education level is self-reported by the participants and therefore, there is some level of bias in the provided responses. Since the authors are dealing with rural population, I would suggest explaining the participants that what is meant by these education levels and why accurate responses are vital to the research. The measure of skewness & kurtosis is a good step and solidifies the descriptive statistics part. In ‘Data Analysis and Results’, it is stated that “CPEC is significantly positively related with rural development (r = 0.411, p < 0.05), opportunities (r = 0.393, p < 0.05) and self-enhancement (= 0.143, p <0.05)”. Please re-consider this as significantly correlation requires at least an R-value of 0.5. For rural development and opportunities, it might be stated that moderate correlation has been found while for self-enhancement very weak correlation can be suggested. Same should be done for rural development and quality of life. Also, justification and support can also be provided to the current interpretation with references. Similarly, when interpreting Structural Model results, kindly support the interpretation with references of one or more research publications. In ‘Robustness Test’, it is stated that “the results of the normal distribution theory test (z = 5.60, P < 0.01) approved that the indirect effect is significant”. Please re-consider this as a z value of 5.60 is very high and means that there are outliers in the data which are causing such high z values. Also, justification and support can also be provided to the current interpretation with references. I would suggest re-visiting the points highlighted here and then kindly review Table 8 for any possible changes to remarks section. The ‘Policy Implications’ section presents some very significant points in relation to the research topic. I would suggest proposing a framework with the help of a flow chart or some other mechanism as deemed suitable. This is optional but can improve the quality of the manuscript significantly. Overall, there are a number of spelling mistakes and additional proofreading is required. I hope that these suggestions would assist the authors in improving the quality of the manuscript. Reviewer #2: This paper studied the impacts of CPEC on rural development and human life sustainability. It is a useful and important study, which is well supported by the questionairs and well referenced. However, there are quite many questions about the study. (1) The structure is quite confusing. For example, Section 4.2.1 comes after Section 3.3, and the Section 4.1 is after Section 4.2.13 ? (2) It would be better that declare the theoretical framework part together, which may involve Section 2 and Section 4 in the manuscript. (3) Section 6 is not really results, but description of data. (4) I could not find the analysis part, but go strait from data description to conclusion. (5) Why use so many semicolon punctuation in the manuscript? For example, the semicolon punctuation in the title. (6) As you mentioned, there were 302 responses. However, in Section 6.5, most questions only get response from 19-32 respondents. Why? ****** 6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review?** For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: No [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.] While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: PONE-D-20-12198.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0239546.r001
Revision 1
26 Jun 2020 Author Response Thank you very much for the Editor and Reviewers comments and their suggestions. After revising and incorporating the valuable suggestions and comments, we believe that the revised version of the manuscript is much approved and can be appropriate for publishing in the reputed journal, PLOS ONE. 2. Please change "female” or "male" to "woman” or "man" as appropriate, when used as a noun. Ans: We have incorporated the change through the manuscript and have used “women” instead of the word “female”. 3. Please provide additional details regarding participant consent. In the ethics statement in the Methods and online submission information, please ensure that you have specified (1) whether consent was informed and (2) what type you obtained (for instance, written or verbal, and if verbal, how it was documented and witnessed). If the need for consent was waived by the ethics committee, please include this information. Ans: Thank you for the comment. We have discussed how the survey is approved by the ethical committee for the data collection in the following way. We prepared a questionnaire and an in-depth interview for data collection that is approved by the research committee of National University of Science and Technology (NUST) for data collection. To get approval of the ethical committee, we presented them the written questionnaire with necessary information (cover letter, demographic information of individuals and questions of the main variables). After minor comments and discussion, they approved the survey for data collection. 4. We note that [Figure(s) 4,7] in your submission contain [map/satellite] images which may be copyrighted. All PLOS content is published under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which means that the manuscript, images, and Supporting Information files will be freely available online, and any third party is permitted to access, download, copy, distribute, and use these materials in any way, even commercially, with proper attribution. For these reasons, we cannot publish previously copyrighted maps or satellite images created using proprietary data, such as Google software (Google Maps, Street View, and Earth). For more information, see our copyright guidelines: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/licenses-and-copyright. We require you to either (1) present written permission from the copyright holder to publish these figures specifically under the CC BY 4.0 license, or (2) remove the figures from your submission: 1. You may seek permission from the original copyright holder of Figure(s) [4,7] to publish the content specifically under the CC BY 4.0 license. We recommend that you contact the original copyright holder with the Content Permission Form (http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=7c09/content-permission-form.pdf) and the following text: “I request permission for the open-access journal PLOS ONE to publish XXX under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CCAL) CC BY 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Please be aware that this license allows unrestricted use and distribution, even commercially, by third parties. Please reply and provide explicit written permission to publish XXX under a CC BY license and complete the attached form.”Please upload the completed Content Permission Form or other proof of granted permissions as an "Other" file with your submission. In the figure caption of the copyrighted figure, please include the following text: “Reprinted from [ref] under a CC BY license, with permission from [name of publisher], original copyright [original copyright year].” 2. If you are unable to obtain permission from the original copyright holder to publish these figures under the CC BY 4.0 license or if the copyright holder’s requirements are incompatible with the CC BY 4.0 license, please either i) remove the figure or ii) supply a replacement figure that complies with the CC BY 4.0 license. Please check copyright information on all replacement figures and update the figure caption with source information. If applicable, please specify in the figure caption text when a figure is similar but not identical to the original image and is therefore for illustrative purposes only. The following resources for replacing copyrighted map figures may be helpful: Ans: Thank you for the comment. We have checked the figures again and realized that there is no need of the figures in the manuscript. Hence we have removed the figure from the paper. 5. We suggest you thoroughly copyedit your manuscript for language usage, spelling, and grammar. If you do not know anyone who can help you do this, you may wish to consider employing a professional scientific editing service. Ans: We have proofread the manuscript from an experts in the relevant field and we believe that the manuscript is now free of grammatical mistakes. Upon resubmission, please provide the following: • The name of the colleague or the details of the professional service that edited your manuscript • A copy of your manuscript showing your changes by either highlighting them or using track changes (uploaded as a supporting information file) • A clean copy of the edited manuscript (uploaded as the new manuscript file) Ans: Dr. Wali Ur Rehman, Lecturer Essex Business School UK proofread the manuscript. His profile is here: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=BzuJF0cAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao 6. Please amend your authorship list in your manuscript file to include author Muhammad Anwar Ans: He is not an author in the manuscript. 7. Please amend the manuscript submission data (via Edit Submission) to include author Ahmad Saad Ans: The author is already added to the manuscript, and this is the final authors list. 8. PLOS requires an ORCID iD for the corresponding author in Editorial Manager on papers submitted after December 6th, 2016. Please ensure that you have an ORCID iD and that it is validated in Editorial Manager. To do this, go to ‘Update my Information’ (in the upper left-hand corner of the main menu), and click on the Fetch/Validate link next to the ORCID field. This will take you to the ORCID site and allow you to create a new iD or authenticate a pre-existing iD in Editorial Manager. Please see the following video for instructions on linking an ORCID iD to your Editorial Manager account: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xcclfuvtxQ Ans: We have provided all the ORCID information of the author. 9. Please upload a copy of Figure 14, to which you refer in your text on page 18. If the figure is no longer to be included as part of the submission please remove all reference to it within the text. Ans: The figure is dropped as there was no specific information to be retained. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Partly Reviewer #2: Partly ________________________________________ 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: No ________________________________________ 3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: Yes ________________________________________ 4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: No ________________________________________ 5. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: The research topic and the overall idea is a very interesting one to say the least. CPEC and potential rural development is surely an important area when considering the successful achievement of SDGs. I have some questions and suggestions in regards to the submitted manuscript which are as follows: Rural women have been the main focus in this research. The educational background provided by the authors suggests that there are 0.7% PhDs and 22.51% Masters/MS/M Phil while another 23.5% has Bachelor degree. According to the data presented in Table 1, about 45% of the women have a Bachelor degree or higher. This is an unusually highly educated population of women especially in a rural, under-developed settings. In Pakistan, such high level of education among women is a rarity even in urban areas and can only be seen in major cities. I believe that education level is self-reported by the participants and therefore, there is some level of bias in the provided responses. Since the authors are dealing with rural population, I would suggest explaining the participants that what is meant by these education levels and why accurate responses are vital to the research. Ans: Thank you for the important comment. As mentioned in the manuscript that an un-educated person may not be able to properly predict potential benefits of a project, nor they are aware of governmental work. Therefore, we gathered evidence from educated women in the rural areas. In addition to this, we also conducted an in-depth interview with 32 those women who have never joined a school. It enabled us to reduce social desirability bias and facilitates us in getting reliable and true information for the research. The measure of skewness & kurtosis is a good step and solidifies the descriptive statistics part. Ans: Thank you. In ‘Data Analysis and Results’, it is stated that “CPEC is significantly positively related with rural development (r = 0.411, p < 0.05), opportunities (r = 0.393, p < 0.05) and self-enhancement (= 0.143, p <0.05)”. Please re-consider this as significantly correlation requires at least an R-value of 0.5. For rural development and opportunities, it might be stated that moderate correlation has been found while for self-enhancement very weak correlation can be suggested. Same should be done for rural development and quality of life. Also, justification and support can also be provided to the current interpretation with references. Ans: We have considering the suggestion and have discussed moderate and weak relationships where necessary. Similarly, when interpreting Structural Model results, kindly support the interpretation with references of one or more research publications. Ans: We have supported the results with references. In ‘Robustness Test’, it is stated that “the results of the normal distribution theory test (z = 5.60, P < 0.01) approved that the indirect effect is significant”. Please re-consider this as a z value of 5.60 is very high and means that there are outliers in the data which are causing such high z values. Also, justification and support can also be provided to the current interpretation with references. Ans: Thank you for pointing out the values to be checked. We have given relevant references who have mentioned similar values in the analysis. We have the references are supporting the values. However, if the ambiguity is still remained, let us know to revise the analysis. I would suggest re-visiting the points highlighted here and then kindly review Table 8 for any possible changes to remarks section. Ans: Thank you for the suggestion, we have slightly revised the table. The ‘Policy Implications’ section presents some very significant points in relation to the research topic. I would suggest proposing a framework with the help of a flow chart or some other mechanism as deemed suitable. This is optional but can improve the quality of the manuscript significantly. Ans: Thank for the suggestion. We have provided a figure and have discussed the implications articulately. Overall, there are a number of spelling mistakes and additional proofreading is required. Ans: We have proofread the manuscript again to remove the grammatical mistake. I hope that these suggestions would assist the authors in improving the quality of the manuscript. Reviewer #2: This paper studied the impacts of CPEC on rural development and human life sustainability. It is a useful and important study, which is well supported by the questionnaire and well referenced. However, there are quite many questions about the study. (1) The structure is quite confusing. For example, Section 4.2.1 comes after Section 3.3, and the Section 4.1 is after Section 4.2.13 ? Ans: Thank you for pointing out the ambiguity in the manuscript. We have revised the format and have corrected the numbering. (2) It would be better that declare the theoretical framework part together, which may involve Section 2 and Section 4 in the manuscript. Ans: Thank you. We have incorporated the suggestion accordingly. (3) Section 6 is not really results, but description of data. Ans: Incorporated. (4) I could not find the analysis part, but go strait from data description to conclusion. Ans: Thank you. We have separated the results from the description of the data. (5) Why use so many semicolon punctuation in the manuscript? For example, the semicolon punctuation in the title. Ans: Thank you for pointing out the mistakes. We have proofread the manuscript and have removed the grammatical mistakes and unnecessary punctuations from the text. (6) As you mentioned, there were 302 responses. However, in Section 6.5, most questions only get response from 19-32 respondents. Why? Ans: We used a structured questionnaire and collected data from 302 respondents in the rural areas. However, in addition to the questionnaire, we also conducted an in-depth interview with 32 uneducated women to articulate the results in a better way. To summarize, we use 302 structured questionnaires while 32 in-depth interviews for the data collection. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to the reviewers comments.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0239546.r002
24 Jul 2020 Decision Letter - Bing Xue, Editor PONE-D-20-12198R1 China-Pakistan Economic Corridor and its Impact on Rural Development and Human Life Sustainability; Observations from Rural Women PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Saad, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. Please submit your revised manuscript by Sep 07 2020 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript: A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'. A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'. An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'. If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter. If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript. Kind regards, Bing Xue, Ph.D. Academic Editor PLOS ONE [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation. Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed ******** 2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Partly ****** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: No ****** 5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: No ****** 6. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: All of the concerns have been addressed. Just a few suggestions to reduce ambiguity and to improve the quality of this manuscript. The sampling method needs to be mentioned in the methodology section. For instance, only educated women have been selected and approached for questionnaire needs to be mentioned like it is mentioned that other 32 women who never went to a school were interviewed. This will improve the understanding of the reader that how the sampling was conducted. Reviewer #2: The structure is still very confusing. For example, Section 4.2.1 comes after Section 3.3, and the Section 4.1 is after Section 4.2.13, Section 1 is after Section 5? ****** 7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review?** For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: No [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.] While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0239546.r003
Revision 2
28 Jul 2020 Author Response Thank you once again the Editor and Reviewers for their time and comments since submission to finalization. We have incorporated all the comments in the revised manuscript. We hope the latest version is ready for publication. Grammatical and typing Mistake: We have proofread the paper again and have detected the grammatical and typing mistakes in the manuscript. We believe that the revised version is free of errors. 6. Review Comments to the Author Reviewer #1: All of the concerns have been addressed. Just a few suggestions to reduce ambiguity and to improve the quality of this manuscript. The sampling method needs to be mentioned in the methodology section. For instance, only educated women have been selected and approached for questionnaire needs to be mentioned like it is mentioned that other 32 women who never went to a school were interviewed. This will improve the understanding of the reader that how the sampling was conducted. Ans: Thank you for the useful comment. CPEC is initiated recently, it is a new project and is not a general project like others. Therefore, is argue that in general, an illiterate person may not able to understand and predict the benefits of the CPEC. During the survey and interview, we also acknowledge that most of the illiterate women do not know the CPEC. So it was difficult to receive relevant information for our research. Hence, we only interview those illiterate women who have some sort of knowledge of CPEC. “For instance, educated people have more knowledge and understanding of CPEC and other mega projects and can predict future benefits. However, to articulate the results in a better way, we also gathered information from 32 illiterate women. We interviewed only those illiterate women in rural areas who were aware of the CPEC. Since it was difficult to know the exact number of educated women in the areas. Therefore, we used a convenient sampling approach to complete the data collection. The convenient sampling method was also appropriate due to the wide geographic distance in these areas. Hence, both educated (for questionnaire) and illiterate (for interview) women were approached conveniently. Moreover, the respondents were informed in starting of the survey that “the survey is a volunteer and your information can help us in completing the research”. Reviewer #2: The structure is still very confusing. For example, Section 4.2.1 comes after Section 3.3, and the Section 4.1 is after Section 4.2.13, Section 1 is after Section 5? Ans: Thank you once again for pointing out the mistakes, perhaps happened due to typing mistakes. We have corrected the numbering in the revised manuscript. Thank you. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to the reviewers comments.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0239546.r004
1 Sep 2020 Decision Letter - Bing Xue, Editor PONE-D-20-12198R2 China-Pakistan Economic Corridor and its Impact on Rural Development and Human Life Sustainability; Observations from Rural Women PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Saad, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. Please submit your revised manuscript by Oct 16 2020 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript: A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'. A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'. An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'. If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter. If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript. Kind regards, Bing Xue, Ph.D. Academic Editor PLOS ONE [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation. Reviewer #2: (No Response) ******** 2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #2: (No Response) ****** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #2: (No Response) ****** 4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #2: (No Response) ****** 5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #2: (No Response) ****** 6. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #2: The structure is still quite confusing. For example, there are two sentions include literature review, such as Section 2 and Section 4. ****** 7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review?** For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #2: No [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.] While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0239546.r005
Revision 3
7 Sep 2020 Author Response Thank you once again the Editor and Reviewers for their time and comments We have received only one comment on the format of the manuscript. We have carefully reviewed the format and have merged some misleading numbering and headings. We believe that the revised format is free of vague and overlapping. We hope that the Editor will approve the paper and will provide his feedback soon. We are waiting to hear the good news soon, as to submit the paper for an award in our university. Thank you once again for your time and consideration. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to the reviewers comments.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0239546.r006
9 Sep 2020 Decision Letter - Bing Xue, Editor China-Pakistan Economic Corridor and its Impact on Rural Development and Human Life Sustainability; Observations from Rural Women PONE-D-20-12198R3 Dear Dr. Saad, We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements. Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication. An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org. Kind regards, Bing Xue, Ph.D. Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0239546.r007
Formally Accepted
11 Sep 2020 Acceptance Letter - Bing Xue, Editor PONE-D-20-12198R3 China-Pakistan Economic Corridor and its Impact on Rural Development and Human Life Sustainability; Observations from Rural Women Dear Dr. Saad: I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information please contact onepress@plos.org. If we can help with anything else, please email us at plosone@plos.org. Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access. Kind regards, PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff on behalf of Professor Bing Xue Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0239546.r008

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