Nghiên cứu sinh Đặng Trung Chính bảo vệ luận án tiến sĩ
ORIGINAL CONTRIBUTIONS OF THE DISSERTATION
Dissertation title: Spatio-temporal dependence of corruption in Vietnam
Specialization: Economics Specialization code: 9310101
PhD candidate: Dang Trung Chinh
Supervisor: Assoc. Prof. Dr. Le Quang Canh
Original contributions on academic and theoretical aspects
The study has one theoretical contribution. The dynamic Spatial Durbin Model and Geographically and Temporally Weighted Regression models show the strength in analyzing the factors affecting corruption in Vietnam. This proves that there exists spatio-temporal dependence of corruption across provinces in Vietnam, includes spatio-temporal autocorrelation and spatio-temporal heterogeneity effects. This dissertation’s results align with the core tenants of ecological complexity theory.
Then, the dissertation has some practical contribution. The independent variable or corruption heterogeneity in Vietnam was significantly associated with a diverse range of predictors across (1) individual, institutional and society levels; and (2) social interaction, economic development and political institutions/government policy categories. Indeed, every predictor showed statistical significance and, in most cases, had a sizeable impact on corruption. This provides strong support for ecological complexity theory’s notion that diverse, multi-factorial models are necessary to explain corruption. Second, Vietnam’s corruption demonstrated persistence and propagation across time/space. Third, this dissertation’s results underscore corruption’s surprising and transformative nature, thereby giving credence to another tenant of ecological complexity theory. In spatio-temporal autocorrelation results, the indirect effects are higher than the direct effects. On this point, only two significant corruption drivers (i.e., net migration and provincial leaders’ proactivity) had an uninterrupted positive or negative direction of association over the 2006-2020 period. Besides, in the spatio-temporal heterogeneity results, other drivers’ direction of association either changed once (i.e., immigration), twice (i.e., transparency and labour) or three times (i.e., freight traffic, provincial GRDP, openness and provincial budget expenditure).
Regarding the former (i.e., net migration), it is important to ‘improve provincial leaders’ performance incentives so that increased business investment from remittances is seen an opportunity to expand provincial economic potential’. Moreover, this can be supplemented with ‘legal institutional mechanisms to protect corruption whistleblowers and incentivize corruption reporting’. At the same time, regarding provincial leadership proactivity, ‘the development of creative, data-driven solutions to social problems can be better prioritized and rewarded’. Preceding this, ‘recruitment can more effectively target candidates who have displayed proactivity and the selection process can focus more on assessing proactivity competencies’. Beyond the above, three more policy implications are worth underscoring. First, anti-corruption policies have to be tailored to local contexts: as this dissertation’s result shows, predictors vairy in their impact across Vietnamese regions and provinces. On this point, ‘anti-corruption resources are not limitless. It is important to maximize effectiveness in cost and outcome by focusing on the most promising factors.’ Second, certain practices, such as transparency, should be repurposed to diminish corruption: the government can ‘develop a mechanism such as a combination of database digitization and the open data initiative for publicizing and upgrading all GSO data’. In turn, this would strengthen public knowledge and oversight vis-à-vis corrupt practices. Third, corruption’s persistence across space and time supports a collabourative, multi-stakeholder approach to the issue.
