Does growth in non profit institutions improve government transparency a case study from vietnam

bs_bs_banner Received: 30 November 2016 | Revised: April 2017 | Accepted: 16 April 2017 Asia & the Pacific Policy Studies, vol 4, no 2, pp 286–295 doi: 10.1002/app5.182 Original Article Does Growth in Non-profit Institutions Improve Government Transparency? A Case Study from Vietnam Khac Giang Nguyen, Quang Thai Nguyen* and Thanh Tung Nguyen Abstract Background Non-profit institutions have long been believed to significantly contribute to good governance practice, particularly in transitional or authoritarian countries Nevertheless, there has been a lack of sufficient empirical evidence to support that claim This article uses Vietnam as a case study to examine the linkage between a rising number of non-profit institutions and the improvement of good governance practice by analysing impacts of non-profit institutions’ development on government’s transparency at the provincial level from 2011 to 2014 To so, the article employs pooled ordinary least squares, fixed effects and random effects models with different sets of control variables On the basis of the quantitative results, we conclude that the rise of non-profit institutions does have a positive impact on the quality of governance in Vietnam, at least in terms of fostering its transparency Civil society is considered as the ‘big idea’ of the twenty-first century (Edwards 2004) and regarded among three main pillars of a society, together with the political and economic societies (Howard 2003) While there has been no commonly agreed definition of ‘civil society’ and its components (Ehrenberg 1999), non-profit institutions (NPIs), or in other words, civil society organizations (CSOs), have been generally assumed to play a positive role in pushing for a more democratic and accountable government (Fukuyama 2001) It was due to the perception that ‘civil society’, in the form of NPIs, would accelerate the democratization process in transitional countries that set these institutions in the spotlight of democracy promotion policy, particularly from the United States, after the end of the Cold War The third sector, as NPIs are called, is also believed to significantly contribute to the society and economy in general (Salamon 2004) However, although a great deal of funding has been pouring into promoting ‘civil society’ around the world since 1991, there has not been sufficient quantitative evaluation of the impacts of NPIs on the society One study, conducted by the Johns Hopkins Comparative Non-profit Sector Project (CNP), uses data on ‘non-profit’ or ‘voluntary’ institutions in 41 different countries (Heinrich 2005) In their initial results, the research team estimates that the ‘third sector’ had a revenue of US$4,109 billion in 2012, ranked fifth in the world if it were a national economy, and employed Key words: Vietnam, non-profit institutions, good governance, transparency, panel data * Vietnam Institute for Economic and Policy Research (VEPR), University of Economics and Business (UEB), Vietnam National University Ha Noi (VNU); email © 2017 The Authors Asia and the Pacific Policy Studies published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd and Crawford School of Public Policy at The Australian National University This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made Nguyen et al.: Improvement in Government Transparency 5.5 per cent of the total work force of surveyed countries (Salamon 2016) Nevertheless, despite its rich data, the project simply provides general statistics from NPIs around the world while spending little to dig in to their impacts on significant variables such as social development, democratization and good governance Other civil society research studies, such as those from the World Governance Assessment, the Civicus Civil Society Index (CSI) and the United States Agency for International Development, on non-governmental sector in post-communist societies, mostly concentrate on defining and measuring civil society rather than its impacts (Heinrich 2005) The CSI is another laborious effort to combine data on civil society organizations from 44 countries to analyse their strengths and impacts on the society Although this project has garnered gigantic first-hand data on civil society in a wide range of countries, it faces a fundamental issue in assessment methodology because its scores largely depend on benchmarks, criteria and perceptions of different local markers (Biekart 2008) In addition, these aforementioned research projects are sometimes at odds with one another on what actually constitutes ‘civil society’ The CNP and United States Agency for International Development take an institutional approach, which considers NPIs/NGOs as a main component of civil society, while CSI and World Governance Assessment call for a more comprehensive approach that includes other factors such as culture and environment This article does not attempt to take part in the debate around the definition of civil society Rather, it seeks to examine possible correlation between growth in NPIs’ number and good governance, at least in the aspect of governance transparency The choice of NPIs as the main independent variable for the article is due to its quantifiability, but does not necessarily represent our own perception of civil society We also aim to zoom in a more specific case to add to the enormous knowledge in the CNP survey that has been conducting for over 287 20 years The lack of specific case studies is obvious limitation of cross-sectional studies, which have been carried out across a wide range of nations with very different characteristics and circumstances Using the institutional approach to identify NPIs in Vietnam, we examine the link between the number of non-profit organizations and good governance practice, especially transparency at provincial level from 2011 to 2014 The estimation methodology involves pooled ordinary least squares (OLS), fixed effects and random effects models with different sets of control variables Thus, we hope to contribute to the empirical literature on the impact of civil societies The case of Vietnam is of academic significance for two reasons First, Vietnam is a transitional country (some would say a democratizing country) that has experienced tremendous market-oriented changes over the last 30 years It will be more statistically feasible to evaluate the impacts of NPIs in a transitional country than a more established one In 41 countries in the CNP project, there are no authoritarian regimes included Second, despite being dubbed as an authoritarian regime (The Economist Intelligence Unit 2016), Vietnam produces acceptable statistical sources that can be extracted to collect, examine and compare data for Vietnamese NPIs The rest of the article is organized as follows Section discusses the concepts of NPIs and governance transparency After that, Section describes our data and empirical strategy, while Section provides regression results Finally, we will discuss the findings as well as their implications in Section The Concepts of Non-profit Institutions and Governance Transparency 2.1 Non-profit Institutions While the definition of ‘civil society’ is controversial, scholars are more consensual on the concept of ‘non-profit institutions’, which can be used interchangeably with voluntary associations, charities, non-government organization or third-sector organizations © 2017 The Authors Asia and the Pacific Policy Studies published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd and Crawford School of Public Policy at The Australian National University 288 Asia & the Pacific Policy Studies (Anheier 2005) Anheier argues that this term is ‘primarily economic in nature’ and refers to their revenue behaviour that does not allow them to redistribute financial gains for the units that establish, control or finance them, according to the System of National Accounts In this article, we will use the definition by Anheier and CNP, which states that an NPI must be • organized, that is, institutionalized to some extent; • private, that is, institutionally separate from government; • non-profit distributing, that is, not returning profits generated to their owners or directors; • self-governing, that is, equipped to control their own activities; and • voluntary, that is, involving some meaningful degree of voluntary participation (Salamon & Anheier 1999, p 3–4) This definition of CNP is appropriate for our study, because our main goal is to empirically examine the linkage between NPIs and governance transparency that requires the definition to be as concise and quantifiable as possible May 2017 Foley 2001) Salamon (1997) thus considers NPIs as value guardians for the society The development of NPIs, as a result, will promote government transparency Furthermore, transparency can help push for better governance by improving accountability, which is also popularly regarded as a pillar for good governance (Doornbos 2006) As Fukuyama (2011) points out, the state efficiently works only when it can produce an accountability mechanism that requires the state to restrict its own power That includes internal accountability among state branches of power and external accountability that requires them to be held accountable before the society that they serve While internal accountability is the responsibility of state builders to build a system that holds the separation of power, external accountability requires the active participation of the public To this, the government needs a high level of transparency to be easily checked among themselves and the public In this article, we examine the Vietnamese Government’s transparency by evaluating its transparency at the provincial level from 2011 to 2014 2.2 Good Governance and NPIs Since the third wave of Democratization in the late 1980s, NPIs are considered as significant catalysts of civil society thanks to their participatory and democratic approach (Bratton 1989) It is believed that it could both be a safeguard against excessive use of state power (Diamond 1994) and strengthen the state’s capacity for good governance by ‘ensuring its legitimacy, accountability and transparency’ (Mercer 2002, p 6) It is widely accepted that transparency is the key to better governance (Hood & Heald 2006), because greater transparency will help build a corruption-free environment and institutions with clear and accessible rules (Saladin 1999) Therefore, one of the main goals of civil society, particularly NPIs, is to make the state as transparent as possible because they function as representatives of social organizations outside the state (Edwards & 2.3 Non-profit Institutions Development in Vietnam Vietnam has remained a one-party state since its independence in 1945; thus, it has imposed tight control on civil society Especially after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc at the end of the 1980s and early 1990s, the Vietnamese Communist Party has tightened their grip over the society, in the fear of a ‘peaceful evolution to overthrow the people’s state’ (di n bi n hoà bình nh m l t đ quy n nhân dân) Despite this, NPIs in Vietnam have grown significantly after the country diverted its development path from a centrally planned to a more market-oriented approach after the Vietnamese Communist Party National Congress in 1986 In addition, thanks to the country’s recent deeper integration into liberal order, such as normalizing relations with the United States, obtaining membership in various international organizations such as the © 2017 The Authors Asia and the Pacific Policy Studies published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd and Crawford School of Public Policy at The Australian National University Nguyen et al.: Improvement in Government Transparency 289 Figure Numbers of NPIs in Different Areas of Activities in Vietnam, 2011–2014 Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the World Trade Organization and Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, the regime’s attitude towards civil society has been considerably softened That, together with the rising economic prosperity in the country, has given rise to a budding civil society in Vietnam for the last decade Only in the 3-year period from 2011 to 2014, the number of NPIs nearly doubled from 3,370 institutions to 6,048 (Figure 1) The calculation on NPIs’ numbers will be clarified in Section Admittedly, NPIs are only one among many factors that constitute the Vietnamese civil society sphere, including both non-governmental and government-owned institutions However, it would not be overstated to say that independent NPIs are playing increasingly important roles in the society One area, that the authors want to examine more closely in this article, is their impacts on the government’s transparency Empirical Model and Data transparency, the main dependent variable in the empirical model is the transparency index (TR), calculated in the Vietnam Provincial Governance and Public Administration Performance Index.1 This index includes three sub-dimensions on provincial transparency: (i) poverty lists; (ii) communal budgets; and (iii) land-use plan or pricing The NPIs’ number per 100,000 people in each province proxies for the NPIs’ involvement Given the definition of NPI by Salamon and Anheier (1999), our main task is to specify types of NPIs covered by it On the Handbook on Non-Profit Institutions in the System of National Accounts, the United Nations (2003) introduces two bases for NPIs’ classification: (i) economic activity and (ii) organizations’ function, in which the former is more widely used To clarify the first basis, the United Nations suggests using suitable economy activity sectors listed in the International Standard Industrial Classification of All Economic Activities Revision 3, which is a classification in terms of production statistics Organizations in the suggested sectors We conduct our empirical analysis using a panel of all 63 provinces in Vietnam during the 2011–2014 period Based on the hypothesis that NPIs’ involvement enhances government’s Conducted annually by the Centre for Community Support Development Studies, Centre for Research and Training of the Viet Nam Fatherland Front and United Nations Development Programme in Viet Nam Available at © 2017 The Authors Asia and the Pacific Policy Studies published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd and Crawford School of Public Policy at The Australian National University 290 Asia & the Pacific Policy Studies are considered to be fit for the NPI definition The United Nations also recommends a special classification, the International Classification of Non-Profit Organizations, to record NPIs In 2008, the United Nations revised the ISIC Rev.3 with more careful consideration of sectors in which NPI can be included Accordingly, NPIs are concentrated in service activities such as education, social work and human health; in principle, however, NPIs can be found anywhere in the ISIC classification Practically, because of the difference in economic characteristics, countries select different sectors covering NPIs Several developed countries, while examining NPIs such as Canada and Italy, have implemented their own programs and used the International Classification of Non-Profit Organizations (United Nations 2008) Meanwhile, in Thailand’s case, the Office of the National Economic and Social Development Board (NESDB) in cooperation with The Johns Hopkins University Centre for Civil Society Studies (JHU/CCSS) have studied the country’s NPIs Satellite Account using ISIC (NESDB & JHU/CCSS 2011) Under the instruction of JHU/CCSS and recommendations of the United Nations (2008), the research classified non-profit organizations in four sectors: education, human health activities, social work activities without accommodation and activities of membership organizations, equivalent to the divisions of 85, 86, 88 and 94 in ISIC This is considered as an effort to match NPIs with divisions in ISIC in developing countries, so that comparative studies on NPIs in both developing and developed countries are possible Besides, this method is more suitable to access and collect significant data in developing countries that have much less comprehensive data on NPIs To figure out the number of NPIs in Vietnam, we employ the methodology for NPIs’ calculation in the aforementioned study (NESDB and JHU/CCSS 2011) Thanks to the compatibility between ISIC and the Vietnam Standard Industrial Classification 2007, the system of economic activity classification used in Vietnam, NPIs in this article are categorized May 2017 in the divisions of 85, 86, 88 and 94 in the Vietnam Standard Industrial Classification 2007 NPIs’ numbers are extracted from Enterprise Census, conducted by Vietnamese General Statistics Office (GSO) from 2011 to 2014, in which all of Vietnamese registered firms and economic institutions are surveyed In that sense, Vietnamese institutions such as ‘t ch c tr - xã h i’ (social–political mass organizations) and ‘h i đ c thù’ (specialized organizations), which are under the control of the Vietnamese Communist Party, are not considered as economic activity based and thus are not surveyed Similar to the NESDB and JHU/CCSS study (2011), Vietnamese firms in selected economic activity divisions are assumed to operate for non-profit purpose, so they are considered as NPIs In an authoritarian country like Vietnam, there are many government-controlled NPIs Therefore, in order to filter private NPIs, organizations that are state owned by nature are excluded.2 NPIs are counted according to the province where they register their headquarters Cross-provincial NPIs’ numbers are calculated accordingly The effect of NPIs’ involvement on the transparency is investigated through a transparency determinants model that includes NPIs’ involvement as an explanatory variable Our main specification is T Rit ¼ ỵ LNPI it ỵ X it ỵ uit where i and t are province and time indicators, respectively ð2Þ TRit is the transparency index of province i at time t LNPIit is the natural logarithm of the NPIs’ number per 100,000 people in province i at time t ð4Þ X it is a set of controls including: male ratio (MRit), urban population ratio (URit), square of urban population ratio ( UR2it ), population growth rate (PGRit), in2 Excluded types of firms are state-owned enterprise, provincial government-owned enterprise and statecontrolled joint stock company © 2017 The Authors Asia and the Pacific Policy Studies published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd and Crawford School of Public Policy at The Australian National University Nguyen et al.: Improvement in Government Transparency migration rate (IMRit) and labour force participation rate (LFRit) in province i at time t Because of the limitation of short time dimension in the panel data, the model is established without lagged terms Data on male ratio, urban population ratio, population growth rate, in-migration rate and labour force participation rate in 63 Vietnamese provinces are collected from the Statistical Yearbook of Vietnam 2014, a publication of Vietnam’s General Statistic Office on Vietnamese basic socio-economic data Table shows the descriptive statistics of the data To make sure that there are no spurious correlations, we conduct the Choi’s unit root test to assess the time series property of variables (Choi 2001) It should be noted that if the null hypothesis is rejected in unit root test for panel data, at least one series in the panel is stationary P, Z, L*, Pm test results reject the null hypothesis for all variables with the exception of Z test for UR However, based on P, L*, Pm tests, the null hypothesis of unit root for UR is rejected, which means that UR variable can be considered to be stationary (Table 2) Table Descriptive Statistics of Input Data Variable Mean Std dev Min Max MR UR PGR IMR LFR LNPI TR 0.497 0.270 0.982 7.527 0.599 0.157 5.780 0.008 0.169 0.780 8.868 0.035 1.054 0.502 0.477 0.097 0.030 1.000 0.507 À2.125 4.435 0.533 0.873 4.330 70.200 0.715 3.470 6.874 291 For the OLS method, we conduct a robustness check by using different sets of control variables We also employ the fixed effects estimator and the generalized least square random effects estimator to estimate the transparency model By calculating changes in groups, both the fixed effects and random effects methods are used to remove time-invariant unobserved heterogeneity in the panel data (Wooldridge 2002) We employ the specification test of Hausman (1978) to determine the difference between fixed effects and random effects methods and investigate the suitable estimator for this model Empirical Results and Findings In baseline estimates, NPIs’ involvement is found to have significantly positive impacts on the provincial transparency The coefficients of LNPI in these regressions range from 0.209 to 0.261 (Table 3) The fixed effects regression estimators are generally not significant However, the Hausman test suggests that the random effects method is the preferred model We continue to employ robust random effects estimate to test the hypothesis Findings show that random effects estimates in (7) and (8) also illustrate positive impacts of NPIs’ involvement on provincial transparency in Vietnam However, the magnitude of the coefficient of LNPI in the random effects method is lower than the pooled OLS Generally speaking, a twofold increase in the number of NPIs per 100,000 people causes the provincial transparency index to rise by roughly 0.2 points according to the (8) regression Table Panel Data Unit Root Test Variable MR UR PGR IMR LFR LNPI TR Inverse chi-squared, P Inverse normal, Z Inverse logit t, L* Modified inv chi-squared, Pm 637.2072*** 378.5852*** 984.5728*** 1059.0597*** 568.4866*** 595.7478*** 770.4420*** À6.9061*** 1.6403 À14.6878*** À16.8463*** À4.8233*** À3.0681** À9.9978*** À15.7443*** À4.1517*** À31.1302*** À33.9948*** À13.5212*** À13.8387*** À22.9499*** 32.2030*** 15.9114*** 54.0850 58.7772*** 27.8740 30.7094*** 40.5960*** Note: *, ** and *** show significance at 10%, 5%, and 1%, respectively © 2017 The Authors Asia and the Pacific Policy Studies published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd and Crawford School of Public Policy at The Australian National University 292 Independent variables MRit URit URit PGRit IMRit LFRit LNPIit Constant Number of Obs F-statistic or Wald chi-square Hausman test Pooled OLS with robustness (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) Fixed effects (6) À3.943 (3.988) À0.803*** (0.253) À0.863 (4.017) À2.669*** (0.738) 2.211*** (0.787) À0.356 (4.030) À2.694*** (0.734) 2.267*** (0.781) À0.014 (0.040) 2.150 (4.396) À2.759*** (0.728) 2.287*** (0.781) À0.072 (0.065) 0.007 (0.004) 0.209*** (0.049) 7.921*** (1.965) 244 F(3, 240) = 12.22 Prob > F = 0.000 0.212*** (0.049) 6.670*** (1.946) 244 F(4, 239) = 11.77 Prob > F = 0.0000 0.214*** (0.050) 6.433*** (1.949) 244 F(5, 238) = 9.47 Prob > F = 0.0000 0.220*** (0.051) 5.208**(2.130) 244 F(6, 237) = 8.19 Prob > F = 0.0000 4.011 (4.57) À2.228*** (0.753) 1.963** (0.786) À0.081 (0.065) 0.004 (0.005) 3.276*** (1.086) 0.261*** (0.050) 2.240 (2.302) 244 F(7, 236) = 9.18 Prob > F = 0.0000 11.660 (8.660) À1.540 (3.588) 2.003 (2.760) 0.151 (0.234) À0.009 (0.009) 2.591 (1.873) 0.154* (0.078) À1.456 (4.456) 244 F(7,62) = 1.55 Prob > F = 0.1662 Random effects (7) 2.396 (5.602) À2.003* (1.069) 1.960* (1.002) À0.011 (0.079) À0.004 (0.006) 3.146** (1.338) 0.208*** (0.058) 3.056 (2.783) 244 Wald chi-square (7) = 32.48 Prob > χ = 0.000 χ (7) = 5.97 Prob > χ = 0.5437 Random effects, robustness (8) 2.395 (5.606) À2.004* (1.069) 1.960* (1.002) À0.010 (0.079) À0.004 (0.005) 3.146** (1.338) 0.208*** (0.058) 3.056 (2.782) 244 Wald chi-square (7) = 32.48 Prob > χ = 0.0000 Asia & the Pacific Policy Studies Note: Dependent variable is the provincial transparency index (TRit); values of standard error are in brackets; *, ** and *** show significance at 10%, 5%, and 1%, respectively May 2017 © 2017 The Authors Asia and the Pacific Policy Studies published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd and Crawford School of Public Policy at The Australian National University Table Vietnamese Provincial Transparency and Non-profit Institutions’ Involvement Nguyen et al.: Improvement in Government Transparency Findings from control variables are also of academic significance While we not find evidence on effects of demographic variables like male ratio, population growth and inimmigration rate on government transparency, labour force participation rate consistently influences the transparency index in each province It can be said that a rise of labour force in Vietnam enhances the governance transparency It is noteworthy that urban population ratio (UR) has a negative impact on the transparency, but square of UR, UR2, has a positive effect on this index This means that the relationship between the two variables follows a U-shape Initially, the urban growth obstructs transparency in Vietnam However, when the UR comes to a threshold ratio, an increase in urban population rate promotes the Vietnamese provincial government’s transparency This threshold ratio in Vietnam is roughly equal to 2.004/(2 * 1.960) = 0.511 according to the (8) regression Discussion and Conclusions This article is an attempt to examine the effects of NPIs’ involvement on provincial transparency in Vietnam The pooled OLS, fixed effects and random effects methods with the Hausman test for model specification are employed to run the transparency determinants model This study takes into account the stationary properties of variables to avoid spurious correlations in panel data regressions The empirical analysis confirms a positive impact of a rise in NPIs’ involvement in Vietnam on provincial authorities’ transparency as predicted in the theoretical framework The random effects estimator is the preferred model, in comparison with the fixed effects estimator according to the Hausman test The effect of NPIs’ involvement on the provincial transparency is relatively substantial A twofold increase in the number of NPIs per 100,000 people causes the provincial transparency index to rise by roughly 0.2 points This article contributes to the current literature in two ways First, empirical findings 293 in this article confirm the correlation between growth in NPIs and good governance, in particular governance transparency, by using the small and homogenous sample of all Vietnamese provinces that share the same political system Second, this study makes use of different estimation strategies in a transparency determinants model to deliver robust findings From this article, it is evident that Vietnam needs more suitable policies to create incentives for NPIs’ development in order to enhance good governance, in particular transparency Currently, the Vietnamese one-party regime’s attitude towards civil society in general and NPIs in particular remains vague Newly elected leadership in the Vietnamese Communist Party holds a conservative stance on civil society, labelling it as one of 27 ‘dangerous tendencies’ that party members and the society should avoid (Vietnamese Communist Party 2016) However, while warning against the danger of ‘civil society’, the regime has increasingly given NPIs more space to participate in the country’s sociopolitical life for the last 30 years The Vietnamese Government emphasizes the role of NPIs, social organizations as they are called, in promoting economic development, erasing poverty and supervising the state’s activities in various official documents and leaders’ speeches It seems that the regime is ambiguous on how to treat NPIs: on one hand, it wants to keep NPIs under strict control in fear of subversive activities planned by foreign agents; on the other hand, it also wants NPIs to help solve increasing social issues that the country is facing with after embracing the market economy approach That explains why the Vietnamese Government does not have a comprehensive policy on NPIs After the Executive Order No 102/SL-L004 by the National Assembly in 1957 on Associations, Vietnam has not had a specific law to govern activities of NPIs The government has consistently used decrees and ministry’s directives to control the activities of NPIs, which makes the legal environment for NPIs extremely unstable The Vietnamese © 2017 The Authors Asia and the Pacific Policy Studies published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd and Crawford School of Public Policy at The Australian National University 294 Asia & the Pacific Policy Studies National Assembly has reviewed 13 draft laws on associations since the late 1990s to 2016, but all were rejected The most recent draft law was delayed in 21 November 2016 Different from developed countries, particularly ones surveyed in the CNP project conducted by John Hopkins University in which the government support accounts for around a third of its source of funding (Salamon et al 2012), the Vietnamese Government gives almost no economic resources to independent NPIs, in favour of state-sponsored mass organizations (Thành et al 2015) We believe that the conservative approach from the regime might result from a lack of meaningful evidence on its roles in the economy and society Thus, this article aims to set the initial background for more evidence-based policy discussions on impacts of NPIs on the Vietnamese society, in doing so helping push further the debates on their role for better governance Obviously, as the research only focuses on the correlation between NPIs’ development and transparency, it will have serious setbacks on fully evaluating actual impacts of NPIs on good governance, which combines many factors other than transparency In addition, even the notion of ‘good governance’ itself is not universally accepted and might never be (Doornbos 2006) Therefore, the authors consider this article as the very first step in analysing the roles of NPIs in fostering better 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Vietnamese Provincial Transparency and Non-profit Institutions? ?? Involvement Nguyen et al.: Improvement in Government Transparency Findings from control variables are also of academic significance... ratio, population growth rate, in- migration rate and labour force participation rate in 63 Vietnamese provinces are collected from the Statistical Yearbook of Vietnam 2014, a publication of Vietnam? ??s