Page 132 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 44

FU Caiwu & YUE Nan / Restrictions on incremental financial investment in the construction of 131
modern public cultural service system: Based on investigations of county public libraries

library sector nationwide. In 2004, outputs of county level libraries in the central, western, eastern
and northeast areas had the greatest impact on the public library sector in these respective areas,
with contribution rates reaching to 0.72-0.82. The contribution rate of the eastern area reached
the peak in 2006, with an output contribution rate of 0.66; the rate dropped to the lowest level in
2012 and remained around 0.55. After 2012, in the context of slow rise of overall performance of
the public library sector nationwide, importance and influence of county level libraries still kept
declining. This shows that importance of county level libraries to the country’s whole public library
sector has become weaker and weaker (see Figure 5). The development of county level libraries
has been fixed into a downward spiral and county level libraries have to face the challenge of ever-
increasing marginalization .
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Figure 5. Contribution rates of county level libraries to input and output by area 2001-2015.

3.1.4 The trend of “soft contraction” in the cultural sector can hardly sustain the conventional
supply-side expansionary fiscal policy
“System idle”, declining importance and unoptimistic development expectation of county level
libraries reflect the state of “soft contraction” existing in conventional cultural sectors to some
extent. Comparing to the absolute excess capacity and stalling growth of material production
sectors, the country’s cultural sector still maintains the basic state of continued growth and
represents a highlight of the country’s socio-economic development. But there are some
approaching challenges in this process. Different from the state of “hard contraction” in some
material production sectors, the development trend of “soft contraction” in the cultural field is
primarily demonstrated by the performance of the public cultural sector locked in a downward
spiral, declining growth rate for cultural industries, and “system idle” of grassroots cultural
institutions. While absolute value is still growing, this sector is generally undergoing low-
efficiency recycling. Performance of county level libraries registered a peak value over the period
of 2003-2004 and soon declined drastically. It rose slightly in 2012 and still remained at a lower level

① Input and output contribution rates in this part of the thesis refer to ratios of input and output scores of county levels to those of
public libraries nationwide. See Figure 4 for detailed explanation.