Browse FSI scholarship on geopolitics, global health, energy, cybersecurity and more.
Featured Publications
Sacred Foundations
This major study by Anna Grzymała-Busse shows that the Catholic Church both competed with medieval monarchs and provided critical templates for governing institutions, the rule of law, and parliaments.
Silicon Triangle: The United States, Taiwan, China, and Global Semiconductor Security
Larry Diamond and colleagues examine the “silicon triangle" that binds the United States, Taiwan, and China and will impact each country's economy, security, trade, and long-term competitiveness.
Hinge Points: An Inside Look at North Korea's Nuclear Program
Siegfried Hecker recounts the seven trips he made to North Korea between 2044 and 2021 to explore ways to reduce the danger posed by Pyongyang’s advancing nuclear weapons program.
Objective: The measures implemented to control the spread of Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) could affect children’s mental and vision health. Youth particularly from minority and socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds were more likely to be impacted by these measures. This study aimed to examine the mental health of children with vision impairment and associated factors in North-western China during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted among 2,036 secondary school children living in Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. Participants completed a survey on sociodemographic and lifestyle information and answered the Chinese version of the 21-item Depression Anxiety Stress Scales (DASS-21) questionnaire. Presenting visual acuity was measured by a trained enumerator. Multivariate logistic regression analysis was used to identify potential risk factors for mental health problems.
Results: Responses from 1,992 (97.8%) children were included in the analysis after excluding those with incomplete mental health outcome data. The prevalence of depression, anxiety and stress symptoms within the dataset were 28.9, 46.4, and 22.3%, respectively. The distribution of children with different stress levels differed significantly between those with and without vision impairment (p = 0.03). Multivariable logistic regression analyses revealed that depression symptoms decreased with higher parental education (OR, 0.76, 95% confidence intervals (CI):0.63–0.96), longer sleep duration (OR, 0.90, 95% CI: 0.81–0.97) and longer study time (OR, 0.82, 95% CI: 0.74–0.91), whereas they increased with higher recreational screen time (OR, 1.19, 95% CI: 1.08–1.32). Anxiety symptoms decreased with higher parental education (OR, 0.80, 95% CI: 0.66–0.96) and increased with higher recreational screen time (OR, 1.15, 95% CI: 1.04–1.27) and being a left-behind child (OR, 1.26, 95% CI: 1.04–1.54). In addition, stress symptoms decreased with longer sleep duration (OR, 0.92, 95%CI: 0.85–0.99) and increased with higher number of siblings (OR, 1.10, 95% CI: 1.01–1.19), higher recreational screen time (OR, 1.15, 95% CI: 1.04–1.28) and older age (OR,1.12, 95% CI: 1.004–1.24).
Conclusion: A considerable proportion of our sample experienced mental health problems during the pandemic. Healthcare planners in China should consider interventions such as reducing recreational screen time, ensuring sufficient sleep, and timely detection of mental health symptoms among socioeconomically disadvantaged groups.
A proposed system intended to respond to the criticism that software security is context dependent, to minimize the cost of litigation, and to incentivize improvements in software security.
Flourishing is an evolving wellbeing construct and outcome of interest across the social and biological sciences. Despite some conceptual advancements, there remains limited consensus on how to measure flourishing, as well as how to distinguish it from closely related wellbeing constructs, such as thriving and life satisfaction. This paper aims to provide an overview and comparison of the diverse scales that have been developed to measure flourishing among adolescent and adult populations to provide recommendations for future studies seeking to use flourishing as an outcome in social and biological research. We find that most common scales used to measure flourishing are multi-dimensional and assess features over monthly or yearly intervals, and many have been translated and validated across multiple geographical contexts, including higher- and lower-income countries. Complementing self-report measures with other social, economic, regional, and biological indicators of flourishing may provide a holistic and widely applicable measure of wellbeing that could guide strategies to sustain flourishing societies.
Despite the proliferation of education technologies (EdTech) in education, past reviews that examine their effectiveness in the context of low- and middle-income countries are few and rarely seek to include studies published in languages other than English. This systematic review investigates the effectiveness of educational technology on primary and secondary student learning outcomes in China via a systematic search of both English- and Chinese-language databases. Eighteen (18) unique studies in 21 manuscripts on the effectiveness of EdTech innovations in China met the eligibility criteria. The majority of these evaluate computer aided self-led learning software packages designed to improve student learning (computer assisted learning, CAL), while the rest evaluate the use of education technology to improve classroom instruction (ICI) and remote instruction (RI). The pooled effect size of all included studies indicates a small, positive effect on student learning (0.13 SD, 95% CI [0.10, 0.17]). CAL used a supplement to existing educational inputs – which made up the large majority of positive effect sizes – and RI programs consistently showed positive and significant effects on learning. Our findings indicate no significant differences or impacts on the overall effect based on moderating variables such as the type of implementation approach, contextual setting, or school subject area. Taken together, while there is evidence of the positive impacts of two kinds of EdTech (supplemental computer assisted learning and remote instruction) in China, more evidence is needed to determine the effectiveness of other approaches.
Despite rapid economic growth in China since 1978, rural-urban inequality has widened. High levels of socioeconomic inequality can have profound implications for child development and lifelong educational equity. Using a dataset containing early childhood development (ECD) outcomes of 0- to 3-year-olds (N = 9,053) from study sites in Eastern, Central, and Western China, the study finds that the risks of cognitive, language, and motor delay are, respectively, 43.2, 18.3, and 20.7 percentage points higher in rural study sites than in urban Shanghai (ps < .01). Impact evaluation of cluster-randomized experiments shows that parental training (focusing on child psychosocial stimulation and caregiverchild interaction) can improve parenting beliefs and practices (or investments) and ECD outcomes of disadvantaged rural children (p < .01). Such programs can play an important role in advancing progress toward more social equality and economic equity, the stated goals of China’s “Common Prosperity” policy.
Keywords: early childhood development, Common Prosperity, rural-urban inequality, intergenerational transmission of disadvantage, parental training, parenting beliefs and practices
With the New START Treaty supended by the Russian Federation the future of legal nuclear arms control looks even bleaker than before. This brief lays out the foundations of the treaty and the main obstacles that it faces even before it expires in 2026.
Social media has been fully integrated into the lives of most adolescents in the U.S., raising concerns among parents, physicians, public health officials, and others about its effect on mental and physical health. Over the past year, an ad hoc committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine examined the research and produced this detailed report exploring that effect and laying out recommendations for policymakers, regulators, industry, and others in an effort to maximize the good and minimize the bad. Focus areas include platform design, transparency and accountability, digital media literacy among young people and adults, online harassment, and supporting researchers.
Regional monopoly limits market reforms from improving cross-firm resource allocative efficiency, but little empirical evidence is available from developing countries. This paper provides rich evidence that regional monopoly may hinder the expansion of more productive firms, using the Chinese iron and steel sector as a case. Drawing on a comprehensive panel dataset comprising 11,136 iron and steel firms in China from 1998 to 2009, we demonstrate that market reforms in China's steel industry enhance competition at the national level, but do not effectively improve resource reallocation within provinces. Despite a decline in the market share of the top 10 largest steel enterprises from 80% to 50% between 1998 and 2009, resource reallocation only contributes to 14% of industry-level total factor productivity (TFP) growth, amounting to one-sixth of the contribution from within-firm productivity growth. Furthermore, the effects of resource reallocation within provinces are significantly lower compared to those observed between provinces, suggesting that market fragmentation or frictions hinder the expansion of more productive firms within the same province. These findings underscore the importance of eliminating regional monopoly for developing countries undergoing market reforms to enhance resource allocative efficiency.