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The China museum visit boom: Government or demand driven?

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Abstract

Visits to Chinese museums have grown eightfold between 1995 and 2016. Growth in museum expenditure and space has contributed to most of the increase in visits, although the free admission policy that was rolled out in 2008 also had a significant impact. Demand factors have not had a major impact on museum visit growth with the possible exception of the increase in urban population. Museum demand exhibits decreasing returns in museum quality and museum space but constant return to scale in both. Finally, the government’s move to free admission, as well as the growth rates in museum space and expenditure, is broadly consistent with the objective of maximizing visits.

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Data availability

Publicly available (see Online Data Appendix).

Notes

  1. http://www.cnr.cn/newstop/t20060317_504181100_12.html (Chapter 44).

  2. 11th Five-year Plan for Cultural Construction, http://www.china.com.cn/policy/txt/2006-11/09/content_7342376_5.htm

  3. The literature documents the socioeconomics determinants of the private demand for museum attendance and, more broadly, investigates various dimensions of museum participation (e.g., online versus physical attendance, repeat visit, local or tourist demand).

  4. In a symphony application, for example, Luksetich and Lange (1995) assume that visit is determined by donation and management decisions (e.g., quality) where these two variables are endogenous.

  5. Prieto-Rodríguez et al. (2006) estimate the demand for a wide set of cultural products, including museums, and find an elastic relation.

  6. Bailey et al 1997 study the impact of admission charges in the UK in 1997 but cannot reach a conclusion: ‘It is unclear whether, and to what extent, the introduction of charges affects the total number of visitors, their social composition or their propensity to return.’

  7. Derivations are reported in Online Appendix.

  8. http://www.china.com.cn/policy/txt/2008-02/08/content_9661602.htm.

  9. The first-order condition also implies a trade-off between museum quality and museum space which is discussed in Eq. (3).

  10. The other inequality, similar to Eq. (2), but involving museum space is omitted because it cannot be tested without information about ps.

  11. Beijing hosts several national museums with unusually high visit counts and a large share of foreign visitors. Hainan has outlier values for visits and missing values for admission fee. Tibet also has many missing observations.

  12. Private museums can also charge an admission fee for regular admission but these museums represent only 10 percent of all museums in 2015.

  13. The admission fee is equal to provincial museum admission revenue divided by provincial visits and can be expressed as an average fee, \({\sum }_{m,a}{f}_{m,a}{s}_{m,a}\), where \({f}_{m,a}\) is the fee paid in museum m for admission ticket a and \({s}_{m,a}\) is the corresponding share of total visits.

  14. The bounds testing procedure is based on the joint F-statistic that all one-lagged variables in the error correction model are equal to zero, that is, \(\gamma =1\) and \({\beta }_{2}=-{\beta }_{1}\) (Pesaran et al. 2001). We followed Fuinhas and Cardoso Marques 2012 and tested each panel separately using the routine of Jordan and Philips (2018). We obtained mixed results because we have at most 19 observations per panel (Narayan, 2005).

  15. Allowing for a structural break in column 6, we cannot reject constant return to scales in both periods: Sum equals 1.01 (p-value .89) in first period and .91, (p-value .41) in second period.

  16. The decrease in price elasticity could be due of a lack of variation in admission fee after 2008 or to measurement error in the construction of the admission fee variable due to an increase in price discrimination after the introduction of free general admission.

  17. p-values are 0 using the coefficient estimates from FD (Table 2, column 6) and ARDL (Table 3, column 3) and by sub-period (column 6).

  18. The conclusion holds using the period-specific coefficient estimates from column 6.

  19. The required museum space in 1996, for example, is (.55*117/2.24)K (using values from Table 5), and the reduction is even more pronounced if one uses instead the period-specific elasticities from Table 3, column 6.

  20. Excluding Beijing, there are 10 national museums, which are located in 10 different provinces, typically in provincial capital cities (https://baike.baidu.com/item/中央地方共建国家级博物馆/8192553?fr=aladdin,).

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Marco Cozzi and Felix Pretis for valuable suggestions.

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  1. National Institute of Cultural Development, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China

    Fenghua Zhang

  2. Department of Economics, University of Victoria, and CEPR, Victoria, Canada

    Pascal Courty

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Zhang, F., Courty, P. The China museum visit boom: Government or demand driven?. J Cult Econ 46, 135–163 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10824-021-09410-x

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