Exploring the cultural and creative promotion performance in Taiwan: a network-based ranking approach

ABSTRACT

Since the last few years, the Taiwanese government has been promoting the cultural and creative industries, causing the industries in Taiwan to grow rapidly. This study utilizes data envelopment analysis (DEA) to evaluate the cultural and creative promotion performance of cities/counties in Taiwan. Furthermore, the DEA and network-based approach are combined not only to identify the most important inputs/outputs, but also to identify cities/counties that can be treated as benchmarks. This study confirms the effect of the economic gap between urban and rural areas on the promotion and development of the cultural and creative industries in Taiwan. The cultural and creative promotions in the urban areas are found to be superior to those in the rural areas in Taiwan. In addition, the cultural and creative industries in the northern Taiwan are found to be superior to those in the other areas in Taiwan. This study offers some recommendations for managers in cultural and creative departments in their decision-makings; following which will mitigate the gap between resources available in urban and rural areas and facilitate balanced development of the cultural and creative industries in Taiwan.

KEYWORDS:

• OR in government
• cultural and creative industries
• performance management
• data envelopment analysis
• network-based approach

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. ‘Culture and creativity are our ultimate renewable resource’, said the Director-General of UNESCO, from http://www.unesco.org/new/en/media-services/singleview/news/culture_and_creativity_are_our_ultimate_renewable_resource_says_the_director_general/#.

2. Source: ‘What We Do’ on the official website of the Taiwanese Ministry of Culture, from http://www.moc.gov.tw/content_271.html.

3. Source: Web page regarding Country profiles from the official Web site of the Executive Yuan, from http://www.ey.gov.tw/state/News_Content3.aspx?n=283412AE33AC4D71&sms=7CB99E9BEAC3127D&s=1F2228F54A9BA8B3.

4. The Matrix A may not be unique due to the problem of multiple projections in DEA models (Sueyoshi & Sekitani 2009); however, this problem should not affect a technical efficiency measure (Cooper et al. 1999). Therefore, an occurrence of multiple projections in the Matrix A can be an interesting topic for future studies.

5. The eigenvector centrality method, which is a much improved simple count method, originates in the benchmark concept. Specifically, under this method, a DMU is ranked high if the DMU is chosen as a reference target for many other DMUs.

6. Banqiao 435 Art Zone: www.435.culture.ntpc.gov.tw.

7. Future studies may replicate and strengthen this study by constructing and enumerating the efficient faces; see for examples Olesen and Petersen (1996), Olesen and Petersen (2003), and Sueyoshi and Sekitani (2009) to make a comparison between the results obtained in this study, which may be not usually unique, and those based on the enumerated efficient faces. Even if full dimensional efficient faces do not exist, researchers may see Fukuyama and Sekitani (2012a) for ways to identify efficient faces. Besides, researchers can read Fukuyama and Sekitani (2012b) regarding the choice of non-Archimedean small number.

Additional information

Funding

Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan [grant number 104-2410-H-606-007-MY3].