The OECD was invited by Nguyen Xuan Phuc, Minister and Chairman, Office of the Government of Viet Nam, to evaluate Viet Nam’s programme on administrative simplification, Project 30. This evaluation is intended to help Viet Nam prepare a ten-year programme for regulatory reform. The results of this evaluation were discussed in Paris at a meeting of the OECD Regulatory Policy Committee, 28-29 October 2010, and at an ASEAN meeting in Hanoi on 25-26 November 2010. The ASEAN meeting supported policy dialogue and an exchange of good practice.

Administrative simplification in the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam is currently reaching a defining moment. As in many countries, administrative simplification has already done much to improve public governance and regulatory quality and stimulated competitiveness and equitable growth. It has received much attention and significant resources since 2007, principally by way of the Master Plan to Simplify Administrative Procedures in the fields of the State Governance (“Project 30”) and other initiatives. Project 30 has, between 2007 and 2010, delivered a comprehensive inventory of administrative procedures (APs) published in an online database, a review of the necessity, legality and user friendliness of the APs and two sets of simplification measures.

In the aftermath of the global crisis of 2008, governments recognize as never before that good regulations for markets are both a domestic and a multi-national responsibility. Better regulatory systems are not tomorrow’s agenda, to be tackled when the economy is improving better. Development works the other way around. In a competitive global economy, the regulatory environment of a country helps create the conditions for job creation, entrepreneurship, higher productivity and good governance.

A regulatory reform programme including institutional development will help Viet Nam improve infrastructure, increase productivity and employment, continue to attract investment, and maintain a high rate of growth.

This chapter first takes stock of Project 30, its methodology and its results, as this project is the flagship initiative of the Government of Viet Nam to improve the regulatory environment. Because these projects also have greatly contributed to cutting red tape in Viet Nam, this chapter examines the one-stop shop policy and the measurement of administrative burdens. The next chapter will address other related dimensions of regulatory reform, including the improvement of the legal system under the aegis of the Law on Laws (2008).

The preceding chapter examined Project 30, and other initiatives contributing directly to simplifying the regulatory environment. The experience and the results achieved during the past three years should become the stepping stone for discussing a ten-year regulatory reform programme, integrating state-of-the-art expertise from other countries.

Viet Nam has made impressive progress in recent years in administrative and legal reform, by introducing policies, building capacities and training civil servants to improve the quality of regulation. But “good” is not “good enough”. The original impetus for reform was to assist the transition to a market economy by streamlining and making more userfriendly the regulatory environment for business to prosper. There remains much to be done to fully implement policies that have been initiated or announced, and to further develop the instruments of regulatory quality. The reforms are still new and so have not yet become part of the regulatory culture, particularly at the lower levels of the administration. In addition, policy makers and civil servants need to develop skills and expertise in the use of regulatory policy tools (such as RIA) in order to use them to their fullest potential. This chapter, therefore, also highlights some of the challenges ahead and suggests policy options for future reforms.