Vietnam is one of the few PRSP countries in Southeast Asia, and its poverty reduction after Doi Moi has been remarkable. Many, including IMF and the World Bank, praise the success of the PRSP for Vietnam. However, the question whether the success could mostly be attributed to the PRSP or not requires careful examination since the full-PRSP was approved only in 2002 as an action plan of already enacted Ten Year Socio-Economic Development Strategy for 2001-2010 and Five Year Socio-Economic Development Plan for 2001-2005. Moreover, the PRSP for Vietnam was given the title, Comprehensive Poverty Reduction and Growth Strategy (CPRGS), and the government made clear its belief that poverty reduction requires economic growth. Avoiding the tremendous work to process household survey data, the present paper focuses on the regional differences of poverty reduction for the period of 2001-2005 and tries to answer the question. It examines the causal relations of poverty reduction with industrialization, state budget expenditure, and poverty focused policies by the method of simple quantitative comparison. The paper concludes that the poverty reduction in Vietnam in the period of CPRGS was caused mainly by a trickle down effect. The role of PRSP was supplementary.