Comparative political economy offers a wealth of hypotheses connecting decentralization to improved
public service delivery. In recent years, influential 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 because of the unique way in which it designed its recentralization, piloting a removal of elected People’s
Councils in ninety-nine districts across the country and stratifying the selection by region, type of province, and
urban versus rural setting. We take advantage of the opportunity provided by this quasi-experiment to test the core
hypotheses regarding the decision to shift administrative and fiscal authority to local governments. We find that
recentralization significantly improved public service delivery in areas important to central policy-makers, especially
in transportation, healthcare, and communications.