Project description
How government restructuring shapes corruption and inequality
It is well known that corruption undermines public trust, distorts economic incentives, and comes with a high cost for businesses and citizens. However, little is known about how large-scale institutional reform affects corruption dynamics. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the POC project will explore Vietnam’s 2025 administrative overhaul, which reduced the number of provinces, abolished district tiers, and merged ministries. It will use this case to assess how changes in bureaucratic structure influence bribery, access to services, and economic outcomes. The project’s goal is to shed light on how consolidation reshapes corruption patterns, bargaining power, and inequality across different social and economic groups. Overall, the project aims to provide rare causal evidence about who benefits from state reform.
Objective
Corruption distorts incentives, weakens public investment, and imposes heavy costs on firms and citizens. While sometimes seen as “greasing the wheels,” such effects are rare and short-lived; more often, officials create red tape to extract rents, sustaining self-reinforcing “bad equilibria.” Theory predicts that fragmented bureaucracies multiply bribes and uncertainty, while consolidation centralizes rents but can lower burdens on firms. Yet systematic evidence on how large-scale restructuring affects corruption remains scarce.
Vietnam’s 2025 administrative overhaul provides an unprecedented natural experiment. The government is cutting provinces from 63 to 34, abolishing the district tier, and merging ministries from 30 to 22, eliminating nearly 80,000 positions. These reforms reshape veto points across sectors and alter citizens’ access costs, enabling causal identification via difference-in-differences. Two unique national surveys provide rich data: the Provincial Competitiveness Index of 8,000 domestic and 2,000 foreign firms, and the Public Administration Performance Index of 13,000–14,000 citizens annually, with more than a decade of pre-reform waves.
This project leverages these conditions to assess both efficiency and equity. One paper examines how ministry mergers affect bribery burdens and firm outcomes; another studies how provincial consolidation shifts citizens’ bribe-paying, bargaining power, and reliance on intermediaries. Both also test heterogeneous effects across firm size, gender, and minority status. By combining quasi-experimental variation with high-quality microdata, the project will generate rigorous evidence on how centralization reshapes corruption and who gains from reform.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- social sciences sociology social issues corruption
- social sciences political sciences public administration bureaucracy
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
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Call for proposal
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2025-PF
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
9 Dublin
Ireland
The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.