Lahore

Lahore contributes 13.2% of Pakistan's national economy from a city whose official population has barely moved on paper since 1998 — a statistical fiction that masks one of South Asia's most explosive growth stories. The 2017 census recorded 11.1 million residents, but satellite analysis and utility connections suggest the metropolitan area now exceeds 13 million, with 6,300 people packed into every square kilometre.

Lahore exists because the Ravi River exists. Founded over a thousand years ago on the river's eastern bank, the city became the Mughal Empire's cultural capital — its Badshahi Mosque, Shalimar Gardens, and Lahore Fort all date from the 16th and 17th centuries. The British made it the capital of Punjab province, and Partition in 1947 tore the region in half: Lahore stayed in Pakistan while Amritsar, just 50 kilometres east, went to India. That rupture severed centuries of cross-border trade and transformed Lahore from a regional centre into Pakistan's cultural and intellectual capital by default.

The city's GDP (PPP) reached an estimated $84 billion in 2019 and is projected at $102 billion by 2025, growing at 5.6% annually. But the Wikipedia entry buries the real story: Lahore has quietly become Pakistan's engineering and IT hub. It is the country's largest software and hardware production centre, with IT professionals earning 50-100% above the national average. Some 42% of the workforce now works in services — finance, banking, real estate — rather than manufacturing. Meanwhile, the handmade carpet industry operates from workshops across the city, making Lahore the centre of Pakistan's second-largest cottage industry.

Textiles still dominate Pakistan's exports — 66% of merchandise exports, 40% of employed labour — and Lahore sits at the centre of this dependency. The country's failure to diversify exports beyond cotton and textiles mirrors a biological monoculture: high yield under stable conditions, catastrophic vulnerability to disruption. When global cotton prices swing or Western buyers shift sourcing to Bangladesh or Vietnam, Lahore's factory districts feel it within weeks. The city is simultaneously Pakistan's most modern economy and a case study in path dependence — its Mughal-era role as a trade crossroads locked in a manufacturing identity that persists five centuries later.