Limit this search to....

Paper Tigers, Hidden Dragons: Firms and the Political Economy of China's Technological Development
Contributor(s): Fuller, Douglas B. (Author)
ISBN: 0198843224     ISBN-13: 9780198843221
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
OUR PRICE:   $40.84  
Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats
Published: July 2019
Qty:
Additional Information
BISAC Categories:
- Political Science | Political Economy
- Business & Economics | Development - Economic Development
- Business & Economics | Industries - Computers & Information Technology
Dewey: 950
Physical Information: 0.6" H x 6.1" W x 9.1" (1.00 lbs) 304 pages
Themes:
- Cultural Region - Chinese
 
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc.
Publisher Description:
China presents us with a conundrum. How has a developing country with a spectacularly inefficient financial system, coupled with asset-destroying state-owned firms, managed to create a number of vibrant high-tech firms?

China's domestic financial system fails most private firms by neglecting to give them sufficient support to pursue technological upgrading, even while smothering state-favoured firms by providing them with too much support. Due to their foreign financing, multinational corporations suffer from
neither insufficient funds nor soft budget constraints, but they are insufficiently committed to China's development. Hybrid firms that combine ethnic Chinese management and foreign financing are the hidden dragons driving China's technological development. They avoid the maladies of China's
domestic financial system while remaining committed to enhancing China's domestic technological capabilities.

In sad contrast, China's domestic firms are technological paper tigers. State efforts to build local innovation clusters and create national champions have not managed to transform these firms into drivers of technological development.

These findings upend fundamental debates about China's political economy. Rather than a choice between state capitalism and building domestic market institutions, China has fostered state capitalism even while tolerating the importing of foreign market institutions. While the book's findings suggest
that China's state and domestic market institutions are ineffective, the hybrids promise an alternative way to avoid the middle-income trap. By documenting how variation in China's institutional terrain impacts technological development, the book also provides much needed nuance to widespread yet
mutually irreconcilable claims that China is either an emerging innovation power or a technological backwater.

Looking beyond China, hybrid-led development has implications for new alternative economic development models and new ways to conceptualize contemporary capitalism that go beyond current domestic institution-centric approaches.