The Expenditure Efficiency of Museum Service and Optimization Approaches -- A case from Hubei Provincial Museum, China

Abstract

In the public cultural service industry, museums are endowed with irreplaceable importance and diverse functions. The government, the main infrastructure director, has invested heavily in public services at museums to increase people’s satisfaction with public service and improve the construction of public cultural facilities. Nevertheless, the economic and social benefits created are found difficult to quantify. The results from past research have shown that the project selection as well as design of museums has a certain impact on tourist experience and degree of satisfaction, thus somewhat reflecting the project performance and mirroring the investment efficiency of a museum. This paper takes Hubei Provincial Museum as research object, analyzes its project expenditure structure and project performance from the perspective of socioeconomics, measures the effectiveness of museum expenditure on each category of projects by assessing public satisfaction, and finally puts forward several advice to raise expenditure efficiency for today’s general museums.