Using DEA Models to Measure the Performance of Public Culture Services in China

In recent years, the investment of public finance in the cultural construction has increased continuously in China. There is increasing recognition that measuring the performance of public culture services becomes a significant task. For instance, museums are asked to justify their use of resources in terms of producing meaningful services and impacts to the community. In this study, we performed an analytical research on evaluating the performance of public cultural services in China. More specifically, we applied an analytical technique called Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to evaluate the economic efficiency of the provincial museums located in 31 provinces in China. We first developed a three-stage methodology to construct evaluation indicator systems. We further optimized the input and output indicators to improve the stability of our analysis results. Last but not least, we used ArcGIS to geographically visualize the economic efficiency in 31 provinces on a map.