RAND's international affairs research comprises a range of cross-cutting issues, including global economies and trade, space and maritime security, diplomacy, global health and education, nation building, and regional security and stability. RAND also analyzes the policies and effectiveness of international organizations such as the UN, NATO, European Union, and ASEAN.
This study suggests four timely US actions to address today's competing realities of globalization and economic austerity: raise awareness among clinicians and local health departments; capture and share exemplary disaster management practices across countries; ensure that US global health investments are effective, efficient, and sustainable; and think globally while acting locally to enhance US health security.
This paper explores the potential of the art market for open-source intelligence assessments of cultural security.
The higher-cost US system of cancer care delivery may be worth it, although further research is required to determine what specific tools or treatments are driving improved cancer survival in the United States.
The authors compare the experiences of elderly Medicare beneficiaries in Puerto Rico with their English-preferring and Spanish-preferring Medicare counterparts in the U.S. mainland.
Patients who miss clinic appointments make unscheduled visits which compromise the ability to plan for and deliver quality care.
Health outcomes in developing countries continue to lag the developed world, and many countries are not on target to meet the Millennium Development Goals.
Many scholars and pundits have concluded that the noticeable downturn in U.S.-China relations in 2010 was merely an intermittent low in the broader "high-low" dynamic that characterizes the relationship. This article argues that recent tensions can also be understood as part of larger, macro-level suspicions stemming from the disparate identities that pervade bilateral relations.
This paper assesses the role of historic sites and antiquities in foreign engagement. Over the past century, U.S. foreign policy has had successes and shortcomings in leveraging protection of cultural patrimony to strategic advantage.
This article carries out a secondary data analysis to determine the frequency of anemia in different categories of body mass index (BMI) and the frequency in which obesity and anemia co-occurred in children between 2 and 18 years of age.
This study assessing trends in late-life disability in the emerging economy of Taiwan showed that limitations in seeing, hearing, and instrumental activities of daily living declined.
The objective of this study was to develop a self-administered measure that covers all key and culturally appropriate domains of mental health, which can be applied to compare levels of mental health across different age, gender and ethnic groups. We present the item reduction and validation of the Positive Mental Health (PMH) instrument in a community-based adult sample in Singapore.
This article examines ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) operations in Afghanistan as a way to get at the strategic disconnects in ends, ways, and means that the author believes are endemic to large-scale protracted stability and COIN (counterinsurgency) operations against adversaries who do not pose palpable existential threats to the members of an alliance.
This project addressed the lack of comparable health measures and indices across nations by developing a cross-national model for measuring health status. In applying the measures to several nations, the study found significant variability in genuine health that correlates most closely with national income.
Lymphatic filariasis is endemic in districts of India where control programs are not operational.
Since most poor women deliver at home in developing countries, efforts to reduce maternal deaths should prioritize community-based interventions aimed at making home births safer.
This paper examines auction sales of African tribal art for the continent as a whole and by individual nations of origin.
This paper defines a framework for the collection of cultural intelligence as a fundamental asset in countering threats to cultural security.
Discusses the demonstrated efficacy of the COIN principles embodied in FM 3-24, historical evicence and data collected from 30 case studies for recent resolved insurgencies. The vast majority of governments and COIN forces that adhered to multiple tenets of the field manual prevailed over the insurgencies they opposed.
Surveys the subject of air power as an area of research in international security studies and provides a bibliography of significant works and useful online resources.