Page 160 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 44

CHEN Geng & BAI Haohui / Inspection and reflection on the free open policy of public cultural venues in China: Centered on the public libraries 159

4.3 At the policy outcomes level, establishing a performance evaluation system to form
an incentive and restraint mechanism

The evaluation of policy outcomes is the logical starting point for policy adjustment and
optimization, but the current free admission policy is lacking of this important link. There is a
reason that the overall progress of financial performance evaluation is slow which is caused by
China’s fiscal expenditure based on scale rather than efficiency as the basic goal orientation (Ma
& Z.Y. Zhang, 2005). There are also practical difficulties in the financial and cultural departments
lacking professional teams and technical conditions to carry out performance evaluation work.
Therefore, in the context of the gradual increase of the national fund expenditure scale and the
establishment of the public finance framework basically, along with the trend of the financial
budget shifting from “factor budget” to “performance budget”, establishing and improving the
corresponding performance evaluation system and the mechanism of incentive and restraint is
necessary and urgent in reality.
The above proposals that increasing free admission funds, improving classified subsidy
standards, innovating the mode of guarantee require performance evaluation as a basic pre-measure
to avoid the alienation that the increase of funds becoming a new round of funding allocation
mechanism. In view of the overall environment of China’s performance evaluation and the actual
situation of performance evaluation in the cultural field, it is recommended to effectively change
the investment mode that only invests, disregards output and ignores performance, then establish
a fund supervision and evaluation mechanism of “planning-budgeting-input-output-assessment”
in order to improve the benefit and efficiency of financial funds effectively. At the same time,
theoretical research should be strengthened; a scientific and reasonable performance evaluation
index system needs to be designed; a comprehensive evaluation system needs to be established,
which is based on social benefits, and including departmental evaluation, social evaluation, public
evaluation; the traditional methods of industry self-evaluation and government authority evaluation
need to be reformed in order to establish and improve third-party evaluation mechanism. Finally,
it is necessary to strengthen the binding force of performance evaluation results, then use the
evaluation results as the basis of “incentive funds” to improve the incentive and restraint effects of
performance evaluation.

5 Conclusion

From 2011 when locating the free admission policy as “the government’s important livelihood
project” or “cultural livelihood project” in The Opinions, to 2016 when determining it as a long-
term policy in The Public Cultural Service Guarantee Law, the practical value of free admission
policy is becoming more and more important. As a long-term livelihood policy, the policy needs
to be inspected and reflected on periodically with the policy process theory, so as to realize the