Culture Undertakings’ Fiscal Expenditure Efficiency Of Chinese Local Government

In the current world, culture mingled with political and economic. The status and role of culture has become increasingly prominent in the country’s comprehensive national strength competition. Therefore, culture prosperity and development is of great significance. Culture undertakings provide the community spirit products and public cultural services, and meet the various cultural needs of people. The culture undertakings have special properties which are non-profit and are of some nature of public goods. So the development of culture undertakings needs financial support.The Chinese government is stepping up cultural construction; the goal is to build a network of public cultural facilities system covering both urban and rural areas. How to maximize output in the context of limited financial resources becomes a major problem in front of the construction of public cultural. Thus, under this background, the study of fiscal expenditure efficiency of the local governments’cultural undertakings is very essential.Firstly, the paper uses the stochastic frontier approach to analyze the input and output panel data of31provinces from2001to2011and to get the efficiency values. The results show that China’s cultural undertakings fiscal spending efficiency has been greatly improved in the decade. But regional development is uneven; there is a big gap among regions.In order to research influencing factors about expenditure efficiency differences, technical efficiency model is established in the fourth chapter. Several factors are selected in the empirical analyses such as education, population density, economic development, fiscal decentralization and the region and cultural system reforming as dummy variables.It was found that the fiscal spending efficiency of eastern part is significantly higher than the central and western regions due to geographical factors. Socio-economic factors play a significant positive role on the efficiency of fiscal spending, especially for the economic factor. The greater the degree of fiscal decentralization is, the more conducive to the improvement of cultural expenditure efficiency. The reform of the culture system should continue to develop, and to create a good platform for the development of culture undertakings.Finally, we draw on the basic conclusions of the paper, based on the above studies. Then some suggestions are put forward in order to improve the fiscal expenditure efficiency of local government culture undertakings, such as optimizing the structure of fiscal expenditure, training qualified personnel, improving policy mechanisms and transforming government functions. I hope this can promote the local government fiscal expenditure efficiency on cultural undertakings, and complete the public cultural service system early covering both urban and rural areas, making the equalization of basic cultural services true.This paper has two innovations. One is the research methods. Prior literature studied fiscal expenditure efficiency of government culture undertakings using DEA method. It doesn’t have a clear functional form, and lack economic significance. So this article used the stochastic frontier approach. The other is that the paper enriches study areas of financial expenditure in content and research methods.