Page 116 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 44

FU Caiwu & YUE Nan / Restrictions on incremental financial investment in the construction of 115
modern public cultural service system: Based on investigations of county public libraries

efforts to address the problem of longstanding unfairness existing in public libraries and provide
key support to areas with high efficiency but low fiscal subsidy. Fu Caiwu and Zhang Weifeng
(2017) measured data of comprehensive efficiency, pure technical efficiency and scale efficiency
of provincial public libraries, considering that weak technical efficiency and congested resource
allocation have led to low efficiency of overall public library service. Fu Caiwu and Xu Qitong
(2017), on the basis of the research of performances of ten county/township comprehensive cultural
stations in five provinces, considered that grassroots cultural institutions are facing a paradox that
public resources investment continue to increase while their performances keep to weaken; efforts
should be therefore made to review reform orientations and policy approaches for grassroots
cultural institutions. The foreign academia attaches importance to research on regional disparity
of public service delivery with the aim of eliminating cultural poverty and inequality. Zhu and
Peyrache (2015), through the method of DEA, reviewed efficiency of public service delivery in
different areas of China and UK, considering that as a representative of delivering cultural service
in a dispersed manner, China has not yet developed an optimized plan in cross-regional distribution
of resources, although distribution of resources within one single region has been carried out
more effectively; due to the highly-centralized fiscal system, UK features more efficient cross-
regional distribution of resources, while re-distribution of resources within one single region is less
optimized, which is a major reason leading to low efficiency of its public service delivery. Aaberge,
Bhuller M, Langrgen and Mogstad (2010) suggested that distributing public service in line with
needs would be conducive to reducing the number of poverty-stricken people and inequality.
The construction of the public cultural service system launched in 2007 has provided a new
context of practice for the Chinese community of library science and resulted in a new domain of
issues. One of the key issues is to examine the efficiency of libraries as public cultural institutions
within a framework of relationships with external environment, re-understand equalization and
efficiency of public cultural service under the goal of building the national public cultural service
system, and attempt to construct theoretic basis for the optimization of public administration by
developing a theoretic model to balance fairness and efficiency. It indeed represents an in-depth
logic for the construction of the public cultural service system and a significant issue that restrains
the current construction of the public cultural service system. Hu Shuigen and Weng Lieen (2017)
pointed out that regulation malfunction is a common problem; when the government carries out
public regulation policies, economic efficiency cannot be improved at all and regulation cost
exceeds regulation benefit. Regrettably, while the academia has already recognized the importance
and urgency of the matter, its research of county level public libraries still focuses on the central-
branch library system that has long been lacking in guarantees and has already lost its service
function, rather than the balance between fairness and equalization of county level public libraries
(C.P. Li, 2013). The thesis holds that in building the public cultural service system, government
failure has happened in some areas: mandatory public resources under the institutional framework
of units have been allocated in low efficiency, performance of public cultural institutions has
declined, and institutions have remained idle. Meanwhile, with the fast development of information