Market-Oriented Reforms, Economic Efficiency and Commercial Performing Arts in China

A comprehensive market-oriented reform in the performing arts sector has been promulgated and implemented from the year 2003 by the Chinese government. In this context, this study evaluates the economic efficiency of the commercial performing arts sector in China by using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) method. The findings indicate that the number of technically efficient commercial performing arts sub-sectors has not increased significantly during the sample years. The findings also show that there is room for the commercial performing arts sector to improve their efficiency by optimizing operation of resources and production scale, particularly by the latter. Because the major cause of inefficiency among the inefficient sub-sectors is inappropriate scale of production.