Paper Tigers

Paper Tiger shifts the debate on state failure and opens up new understanding of the workings of the contemporary Indian state.

Traces the author's year-long attempt to earn a competitor's spot at the PGA Tour Qualifying School, an endeavor marked by such challenges as crash diets, sports psychiatrists, and obscure tournaments.

When his Little League team gets a coach who knows nothing about baseball, seventh grader Corey is dismayed to see the team taken over by the coach's pushy twelve-year-old granddaughter.

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.

A disfigured woman discovers a haunted photo album that could make her whole again but only at a terrible price.

Political and economic reform is at the top of national agendas around the world. This book based on Moises Naim's participation in the Venezuelan reform experience and as executive director at the World Bank raises questions and explores problems crucial to achieving national reform strategies. Naim's lucid analysis grapples with the problems of dealing with entrenched interests bent on derailing reform; allaying the corrosive effects of corruption and public outcry over inequitable burdens; coping with the political instability brought on by decimated public institutions; managing the impact of reforms on the military establishment; and mobilizing public support for measures as essential as they are painful. The heady days of revolution are gone and these and other dilemmas now confront besieged reform governments everywhere. The problem of managing these in the real world is the subject this book tackles.

For any aspiring martial artist having a real-life, hard-drinking, version of Mr Miyagi turn up on your doorstep offering to teach the secrets of the Samurai would be a dream come true. When Toby's best friend Bryan returns from travelling in Japan, along with the enigmatic kendo master Suzuki-sensei, he jumps at the chance to move to the foothills of Mount Fuji to study the traditional art of Japanese sword fighting. But from the very beginning, life as a modern-day Samurai – particularly one required to work in a stifling paper factory – proves even more challenging than becoming the real ‘Karate Kid’. Despite a toe-curling disregard for the rules and Japanese social etiquette, they are drawn kicking, screaming, and laughing into the fascinating no-nonsense world of Bushido – The Way of the Warrior.

Paper Tigers is a riveting, authoritative and in-depth study of newspaper barons of the world – men and women who wield immense power, and whose ever-changing media empires make compelling case studies of business success and failure. From Rupert Murdoch to Robert Maxwell, Conrad Black to Lord Rothermere, Katharine Graham to Punch Sulzberger, Coleridge interviewed them all. The results confirm his status as a devastatingly astute observer of our times, one with few equals today.