Performance Evaluation And Development Strategies On Chinese Agricultural Exhibitions And Trade Shows

As a new economic pattern with specific platform-attribute, remarkable externality and broadindustrial relevance, exhibitions, trade shows and conventions become a phenomenon gainingincreasing attention. Agricultural exhibitions are the crossover outcome of exhibition economy andmodern agriculture. It comes out of exhibition industry and serves agricultural companies andconsumers, playing a significant role in promoting the process of marketization, industrialization andinternationalization of China's agriculture, boosting agricultural trade and rural economy developmentand enhancing the competitiveness of agricultural enterprises.Since2002, the exhibition and convention industry of China grows at a speed of15%to20%annually, making China an emerging center of international exhibitions. The success of Olympic Gamesand World Expo had pushed this process to peak and set a new starting line. Stimulated by this, China'sagri-exhibition industry experiences a booming period. From2004to2009, the amount of agriculturalexhibitions increases up to200%. At the same time, the problem of copy exhibition and resourcewasting becomes severe and impacts the development of the whole industry by reducing the efficiencyof exhibition projects. This research is aimed to explore the possibility of establishing a performanceevaluation system of exhibitions and trade shows, and find way out for China's agri-exhibition industry.Based on abundance firsthand data, this research analyses the type, time&area distribution, scalesand prices of China's recent agri-exhibitions, concluding in four main characteristics of thedevelopment of agri-exhibition industry. By setting a multiple linear regression model with data ofamount of agri-exhibitions, agricultural trade value, total agricultural output value and gross availableexhibiting space in different provinces of China, this research illustrated the close relations betweenagri-exhibition and agricultural trade.Based on the questionnaire survey of8agri-exhibitions, this research finds that there are unfixeddifferences between the evaluation made by two-kind users of exhibitions, the exhibitors andparticipants. Difference also exists between the analytic results of multi-dimensional evaluation and themeasured results of overall evaluation on the same exhibition project. This research finds as well thatthe evaluation differences between different exhibition projects sometime have no statisticalsignificance, so it might not be a good approach to use users' evaluation as criteria for the performanceevaluation of exhibitions.In this paper, the relevance between13main indicators such as gross exhibition space, netexhibition space, amount of exhibitors and6minor indicators such as public expenditure ratio, is testedand analysed. Then, two approaches including Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and AnalyticNetwork Process (ANP) are used separately to establish the performance evaluation model. With thePCA method, three components including scale, grade and attraction are abstracted. While under theANP framework, three criteria including exhibiting effect, trading effect and sustainability are adopted.Using data of42exhibitions, the performance evaluation results generating from the two approaches are compared.In the end, this paper proposes some suggestions for the further development of Chineseagri-exhibitions.