The Sukkur–Multan motorway (M5) in Pakistan, which connects the city of Sukkur in northern Sindh with the city of Multan in southern Punjab, opened in 2019. In this report, the authors examine the private and social effects that the M5 has had on the two cities’ religious tourism sectors since its opening. Using key business performance indicators (KBPIs), the authors assess selected components of the religious tourism supply chain through in-person interviews with regional service providers. The authors then aggregated provider responses to infer key social performance indicators and compare them with national averages. Through this research, the authors seek to understand how new supply chains develop around a transport corridor and affect the value added at each node of the supply chain. The authors found that positive private and social benefits resulted in both cities from the reshaping of the supply chain with the opening of the M5. Specifically, private benefits include an increase in access provided by the motorway, investments in online services, and specialization within the supply chain. The public benefits of the M5 include an improvement in the economic growth of the Sukkur and Multan districts relative to the country and an improvement in the economic growth of the poorer city, Sukkur, relative to that of Multan.

RAND and the Observer Research Foundation (ORF) convened an in-person Track II Dialogue on January 12, 2024, at ORF's office in New Delhi, India. ORF is a nonpartisan think tank that focuses on security, strategy, economy, development, energy, and global governance. Sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, this dialogue addressed Russian advanced conventional weapon proliferation and allowed participants to present perspectives on the security environment in Asia and how the war in Ukraine has changed this environment. The Track II Dialogue consisted of three panels of both RAND and ORF experts. The first panel discussed the impact of Russia's continued war in Ukraine on Russian weapon exports and the potential for China to benefit from countries' efforts to pivot away from Russian weapons. The second panel discussed India's decisions to import systems or develop systems indigenously. The final panel discussed the impact of the war in Ukraine on Asia and Asia-Pacific security broadly. These conference proceedings contain six papers — three each by RAND and ORF authors — that were written for this dialogue. This publication provides a summary of the event, conclusions drawn from the dialogue, and the full text of all six papers. It can help inform foreign and defense policy officials in both the United States and India who are responsible for U.S.-Indian relations, bilateral defense cooperation, and defense policy.

In this report, the authors explore the equities of four middle powers — Australia, Canada, Japan, and the United Kingdom — and the roles that they might play in deterring or limiting conflict between China and Taiwan over the Taiwan Strait. A country's equities are its long-term interests in a scenario, such as a cross-Strait conflict. Middle powers are nations that are not small but lack the sheer size and influence to significantly disrupt the global order. However, middle-power countries can influence international affairs through mediation and institution-building, and middle powers can also play a balancing role between adversarial great powers. The authors use four countries — Australia, Canada, Japan, and the United Kingdom — to conduct a case-study analysis on how middle powers perceive China's interests and their own nations' interests in a cross-Strait conflict. The authors held discussions with analysts and policymakers from each middle-power nation on such topics as whether these nations would support Taiwan in a cross-Strait conflict, the threats that China might perceive from these nations, and whether the respondents think that China would initiate a conflict with Taiwan. The authors supplemented these discussions with an open-source literature review on how middle powers have been defined historically to support their analysis of each middle power's equities in a potential cross-Strait conflict. Finally, the authors offer several recommendations for future middle-power strategies that might be useful to policymakers in Taiwan, the United States, and middle powers with a stake in the Asia-Pacific region.

In recent years, China's aspiration for global technology leadership has driven its significant investments in artificial intelligence (AI) for national security, economic growth, and societal well-being. Although there is increasing research and analysis on China's domestic AI development ecosystems and drivers, the details of China's development-financed AI exports remain elusive. Despite being the single-largest provider of foreign development assistance, Beijing does not participate in aid or debt transparency initiatives. To address this gap, researchers from the RAND Corporation and AidData jointly built a new database on China's AI export projects that are funded with official development financing: China's AI Exports Database (CAIED). CAIED uses data from multiple public databases and indexes related to China's global financing and recipient countries' electoral democracy, freedom, and data protection and privacy status. In this report, the authors analyze this quantitative dataset — adding qualitative country case studies based on interviews and social media analysis — to examine the distribution, technology, financing, and data safety aspects of China's AI exports.

With average annual commitments reaching $85 billion in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) era, China has been one of the world's largest providers of development financing. Funded entirely or partially by China's official sector institutions, Chinese technology companies deploy state-of-the-art Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools in many BRI recipient countries. The AI exports facilitated by these arrangements are expected to bolster China's growing global AI technology-supported supply chains and trade flows. These AI tools, as they become embedded in different countries' public and private systems could help China to influence global technology standards and regulations. The China AI Exports Database (CAIED) tracks Chinese government-supported development finance projects that utilized or enabled AI technology in the Global South between 2000 and 2017. It was built on AidData's Global Chinese Development Finance (CGDF) Dataset Version 2.0. Using the latest data mining tools, we identified 155 projects qualified as either an AI Application or as AI Infrastructure (i.e. critical infrastructure for AI applications, or a tool that enables AI applications to be adapted in the future). The CAIED also includes country governance information such as the regime type to demonstrate associations between AI technology use and governance systems.

Weapon exports and the provision of security and military services abroad by China and Russia serve as a means for both countries to extend their influence around the globe. How do such activities affect India — an emerging great power — and what do they mean for India-U.S. security cooperation? A conference held on June 30 and July 1, 2022, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, was part of an ongoing project focusing on these questions. Participants explored Indian and U.S. views on important security issues across the Indo-Pacific and sought to identify areas of mutual interest and disagreement. Discussions were informed by six papers — three from the RAND Corporation and three from the Observer Research Foundation — that discussed common approaches to bilateral security cooperation, Russian arms sales to India, and the challenges posed by China to regional security. This report contains those papers, along with a summary of the issues discussed.