Mercantile Culture
See also: Economy of PakistanPakistan's service sector accounts for 53% of the country's gross domestic product. Wholesale and retail trade is 30% of this sector. Shopping is a popular pastime for many Pakistanis, especially among the well-to-do and the thirty-million strong middle class. The cities of Lahore, Karachi, Peshawar, Islamabad, Faisalabad, and Quetta are especially known for the great contrast in shopping experiences from burgeoning bazaars to modern multi-story shopping malls. In particular, Lahore and Karachi are peppered with colourful shopping plazas. Over 1,081 patent applications were filed by non-resident Pakistanis in 2004.
Read more about this topic: Pakistani Society
Famous quotes containing the words mercantile and/or culture:
“What should I have known or written had I been a quiet, mercantile politician or a lord in waiting? A man must travel, and turmoil, or there is no existence.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“One of the oddest features of western Christianized culture is its ready acceptance of the myth of the stable family and the happy marriage. We have been taught to accept the myth not as an heroic ideal, something good, brave, and nearly impossible to fulfil, but as the very fibre of normal life. Given most families and most marriages, the belief seems admirable but foolhardy.”
—Jonathan Raban (b. 1942)