Fewer offices, one portal: citizens' experience of Vietnam's 2025 local government reform in its first months

Fewer offices, one portal: citizens' experience of Vietnam's 2025 local government reform in its first months

Public policy and government reform

August to October 2026

Sebastian Smith

On 1 July 2025 Vietnam abolished the district tier of its local government, merged its 63 provinces into 34 and its 10,035 communes into 3,321, and replaced 63 provincial e-service portals with a single national portal. This paper asks how citizens' experience of dealing with local government changed in the first months after the reform, and who bore the cost of the transition. Because the reform applied everywhere and the 2025 round of PAPI is not yet available, the paper compares PAPI 2024 with a 2026 telephone survey drawn from PAPI's own respondent lists, under eight explicit comparison rules, and draws on a 2025 review of the e-service portals and the government's SIPAS 2025 survey. Use of the national portal rose from 13.8% to 21.8% of respondents, although part of the rise may be former users of the closed provincial portals moving across. Satisfaction with administrative procedures fell, most of all for land-use certificates, which moved from the districts to the communes, and the share of applicants who had to visit several offices roughly tripled for ordinary commune procedures. Older, poorer and rural citizens are far less likely to use the portal, and so depend most on an in-person route that became more fragmented after the reform. Official counts of online applications can overstate citizens' own use, because in some places officials have been applying and paying on citizens' behalf.

Economics, Public policy