Prevailing work argues that foreign investment reduces corruption, either by competing down monopoly rents or diffusing best practices of corporate governance. We argue that this theory is too broad-brush and that the empirical work testing it is too heavily drawn from aggregations of total...

What do state-owned enterprises (SOEs) do? How do they respond to market incentives? Can we expect substantial efficiency gains from trade liberalization in economies with a strong presence of SOEs? Using a new dataset of Vietnamese firms we document a set of empirical regularities...

Purpose Single-party regimes increasingly use Subnational Performance Assessments (SPAs) - rankings of provinces and districts0 - to improve governance outcomes. SPAs assemble and publicize information on local government performance to facilitate monitoring and generate competition among...

Government corruption is more prevalent in poor countries than in rich countries. This paper uses cross-industry heterogeneity in growth rates within Vietnam to test empirically whether growth leads to lower corruption. We find that it does. We begin by developing a model of government...

Over the past two decades, no two economies have averaged more rapid economic growth than China and Vietnam.But while China‘s income inequality has risen rapidly over that same time frame, Vietnam‘s has only grown moderately. Structural and socio-cultural determinants fail to account for...