Administrative Reform and Governance Performance in Vietnam: Evidence from a Decade of PAR Index and PAPI Data

Vietnam measures the progress of its public administration reform with two very different instruments. The Public Administration Reform Index (PAR Index), compiled by the Ministry of Home Affairs, scores ministries and provinces on how far they have carried out the reform tasks assigned to them. The Provincial Governance and Public Administration Performance Index (PAPI), produced by an independent research consortium with the United Nations Development Programme, asks citizens how governance actually feels from the receiving end. This article reads the two series side by side for the decade 2015–2024, together with the government’s citizen satisfaction index (SIPAS). It relies only on published secondary data and uses descriptive longitudinal comparison and source triangulation rather than econometric modelling. Three patterns emerge. First, official reform scores rose steadily: The provincial mean of the PAR Index climbed from 74.64% in 2016 to 88.37% in 2024, and the distance between the best and worst province shrank from 27.77 to 13.22 points. Second, citizen-reported governance improved far more slowly and unevenly. Dimensions linked to the supply of services, such as administrative procedures and public service delivery, sit comfortably above the midpoint of the PAPI scale, while participation, vertical accountability, environmental governance and e-governance remain below it in every province. Third, the two instruments often rank the same province very differently, and several episodes of compromised survey data since 2023 show that the pressure created by league tables now reaches the measurement process itself. The article interprets these patterns as a gap between reform compliance and governance experience, and argues that the PAR Index is approaching a ceiling at which it can no longer separate strong from weak performers. It closes with proposals for linking the two instruments, protecting survey integrity and redesigning indicators for the two-tier local government system introduced in 2025.