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With rapidly changing marketing landscape, nowadays, the formulation of various marketing strategies is increasingly focused on how consumers tend to make decisions. To meet the highly demanding consumer expectations, market segmentation can be used as an important marketing strategy. Due to gender marketing concept familiarity in the contemporary world, gender difference is one of the reference features in the process of market segmentation for marketers. This research is aimed to examine various determining factors that foster consumer purchase decision-making and the differences between consumers of different genders while making shopping and purchase decisions with special reference to an emerging economy, i.e. Pakistan.

Based on a cross-sectional sample of 367 consumers, the study adapted Sproles and Kendall's (1986) Consumer Style Inventory (CSI) to scrutinize the decision-making of both genders in Pakistan. For data analysis, the exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis in addition to the structural equation modeling has been used.

The study emphasized that, with the exception of quality awareness, brand consciousness, fashion consciousness, option overload and price consciousness greatly affect buying decisions. In addition, when it comes to consumer purchase decision-making, significant gender variations were discovered for both fashion consciousness and price consciousness.

Drawing upon the distinctive cultural characteristics of Pakistan and its people, in-depth research was conducted on purchasing behaviors of Pakistani consumers and the decision-making characteristics of customers of different genders were summarized. The outcomes are expected to make a significant contribution to the field of gender marketing by organizations.

The belt and road initiative (BRI) emanates from China and seeks to connect Europe, Asia and Africa through transport and telecommunications infrastructure. Despite the importance of Africa in the BRI network, very little research has been done on the BRI in Africa, and even less of this emanates from Africa itself. In particular, considering that the BRI investments in Africa are largely transport related, there is almost no research covering the area of logistics, which should be greatly affected by the infrastructure investments. This paper sought to establish the current state of logistics research related to the BRI in Africa.

A bibliometric analysis was conducted on documents extracted from the SCOPUS database.

The findings indicate that there is a lack of research in critical areas such as environmental, social and economic impact of BRI transport investments, governance, logistics performance and international cooperation. In particular, there is a massive gap in local knowledge regarding the BRI.

The study is limited to published research indexed in the SCOPUS database. Future research directions include empirical studies into BRI project initiation investigation, economic and environmental impacts, governance structures and policy intervention requirements and macro-level logistics impacts.

The study emphasises the importance publishing all the relevant information regarding BRI related projects in Africa to create transparency.

The study investigates the current research on the effect of China's BRI on transport and logistics in Africa through a bibliometric analysis. The investigation reveals that while there are huge investments in infrastructure, the actual effect on logistics of participating countries in Africa has not been interrogated.