Governance

Public Administration

Viet Nam

The Government and the Communist Party of Viet Nam (CPV) have given strong signals in recent years to reform the public administration system. The Public Administration Reform (PAR) Master Program, approved in September 2001 following extensive deliberations at the highest levels of the leadership including the CPV, envisages the reform of the entire public administration system by 2010.

The agenda for reform and renovation, under the PAR Master Program, is far-reaching and bold in vision. It includes

• replacing cumbersome administrative procedures with more simplified and transparent ones
• reducing red tape and corruption
• streamlining and better defining the mandates and functions of institutions
• reforming provincial and other sub-national administrations and redefining their relations with the center
• rationalizing the organizational structure of ministries
• raising the quality of public officials
• undertaking salary reform for public employees; reforming public financial management
• modernizing the public administration system through computerization and e-government initiatives

There are three main reasons for the strong support to PAR by the Government and CPV.

1. Official plans call for the doubling of GDP and reduction of national standard-base poverty incidence by three fifths over the period 2000-2010, along with a wide range of other development outcomes.

   Yet because of a recent deterioration in the world economy among other challenges, Viet Nam is currently not on track to meet the growth target, with average and projected growth for 2001-2003 averaging 5.9% p.a., rather than the 7.2% p.a. needed to meet the target. To have any hope of getting back on track, drastic measures will be needed, including the comprehensive reforms called for under PAR.

2. A second impetus for PAR is that Vietnam has commitments under current trade agreements, and would have new ones as part of WTO accession. A more efficient and ethical bureaucracy is essential to meet these commitments, and in turn to promote business investment and economic growth.

3. The third factor is the most important. Viet Nam's leaders are trying to maintain the high level of respect they have enjoyed over the years by recasting the Government as being more responsive, and by reforming the administrative and legal system in ways that will encourage greater transparency.

   They want people to feel there is a mechanism so they can bring complaints against corrupt and incompetent local officials to the attention of higher authorities and that this will discourage bribe taking.

   They also want to provide more effective services to citizens, in order to achieve CPRGS targets such as

   • increasing the rate of children of primary education age going to primary schools to 97% (junior secondary school to 80%) by 2005 and to 99% (junior secondary to 90%) by 2010
   • reducing the mortality rate of mothers at child delivery to 80/100,000 live children by 2005 and to 70/100,000 children in the whole country by 2010 (the rate for mountainous areas is 100/100,000).

The reform agenda under the PAR Master Program covers four focus areas:

There are two alternative approaches that could be considered to address the challenges outlined above.

1. First of all, one could adopt an approach focusing on core government institutions, with leadership from the highest level, and a focus on new policies, procedures, regulations, and systems designed and promulgated by key central agencies; this is the PAR approach.
2. The alternative approach would be a bottom up one, where innovation comes from hundreds of pilot initiatives from different sectoral agencies, and different administrative levels (province, district, municipality et al). That is the reform approach that Viet Nam has mainly used prior to PAR.

Although ADB continues to support many reform initiatives in sectoral agencies, and in selected sub-national jurisdictions, it has been difficult to scale up these reforms because of blockages at the core institutional level such as outdated regulations, low salaries, non-merit based recruitment and promotion, and low skill levels. The PAR program is considered the most effective path for addressing these systemic issues.

The effective implementation of the PAR Master Program requires resources including many support measures and further detailed planning, designing and the appropriate sequencing of policy and institutional actions. It is an unavoidable paradox of PAR that this exceedingly complex and difficult set of measures have to be better defined, planned, phased and implemented by the very administration whose inadequacies they are intended to correct.

In this context, ADB, CIDA, UNDP, and other external development partners have provided grant-funded TA to catalyze the critical actions necessary to give further impetus to PAR implementation, and help the Government to strengthen and improve its overall management of the PAR process.

In addition, the Government requested in 2002 an ADB program loan for PAR Master Program implementation with a focus on two of the seven PAR Action Programs:

1. training and retraining to improve the quality of public officials (Action Program #4)
2. modernization of the public administration through computerization and e-government initiatives (Action Program #7)

The use of a program cluster approach will enable ADB to envisage long-term and sufficient resource provisions up until 2010, as well as continuous and flexible policy dialogues with the Government. Allocation of adequate counterpart fund has been assured by the Government.

In the course of the Program preparation, active donor coordination has been pursued with UNDP and other multilateral and bilateral development partners.