Comparative political economy offers a wealth of intriguing hypotheses connecting political
decentralization to better public service delivery, improved governance, and reduced corruption. Although
highly influential, recent formal and experimental work has begun to question the underlying theory and
empirical analyses of previous findings. At the same time, many countries have grown dissatisfied with the
results of their decentralization efforts and have begun to reverse them. Vietnam is particularly intriguing for
researchers, because of the unique way it initiated its recentralization – piloting a removal of elected People’s
Councils in ninety-nine districts throughout the country, and stratifying the selection by region, type of
province, and urban versus rural settings. We take advantage of the opportunity provided by this quasiexperiment
to test the core hypotheses regarding the decision to shift political and fiscal authority to local
governments. We find that recentralization significantly improved a spectrum of public services, ranging
from quality of roads to healthcare to agricultural extension. Surprisingly, however, recentralization also
dramatically improved the quality of governance, especially impacting the amount of corruption experienced
by Vietnamese citizens. These treatment effects offer a useful corrective to the extant literature and point to
new avenues for research and policy interventions.