Tuan-Ngoc Phan

MSCA Research Fellow, The European Union Assistant Professor in Economics, Fulbright University Vietnam

PhD in Political Economy, Duke University, 2022

I am Tuan-Ngoc Phan, a political economist at Fulbright University (FUV), a liberal arts university in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. I received my PhD from Duke University in 2022, specializing in development, corruption, and Vietnam.

My research examines how political institutions and incentives shape governance and economic behavior, with a particular focus on interactions between provincial governments and private businesses in Vietnam. Methodologically, I use quantitative causal inference methods, field experiments, and large-scale survey data. My research has been published in Political Behavior, Governance, and Business & Politics, among other journals.

In my policy work, I have been a co-author of the annual Vietnam Provincial Competitiveness Index (PCI) reports since 2017. Run by the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry (VCCI), the PCI is the largest annual survey of domestic and foreign-invested firms in Vietnam on the quality of economic governance and the business environment across the country’s provinces.

I am currently based in Dublin, Ireland, as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Research Fellow. Under this two-year fellowship, I am hosted by the Anti-Corruption Research Centre at Dublin City University (DCU), where I am investigating the effects of Vietnam’s major administrative reforms of 2025.