Provincial Digital Transformation in Vietnam: A Stocktaking Through the Digital Transformation Index and Policy Implications

This paper examines the state of provincial digital transformation in Vietnam between 2020 and 2024 using the Digital Transformation Index (DTI), published annually by the Ministry of Information and Communications and, since 2025, by the Ministry of Science and Technology. Drawing on descriptive statistics, year-on-year comparison and an analysis of the index architecture, the study reports four findings. First, the mean provincial DTI rose from 0.3026 in 2020 to 0.6961 in 2024, yet annual growth fell sharply from 32.7 per cent in 2021 to 2.6 per cent in 2024, indicating that the current index is approaching saturation. Second, the locus of growth has shifted from the digital government pillar towards the digital economy and digital society pillars, which overtook it in 2024. Third, disparities across provinces have narrowed markedly in the foundational sub-indices but remain wide in the activity sub-indices, most notably digital society activity, where the 2023 value stood at 0.4181 while fifteen provinces achieved the maximum score for digital awareness. Fourth, year-on-year comparability is constrained both by successive revisions of the index and by the provincial administrative merger that took effect on 1 July 2025, which reduced the number of provincial units from 63 to 34. On this basis, the paper advances five sets of policy implications, centred on shifting measurement from implementation towards final outcomes, prioritising the skills and usage layers of the digital divide, and re-establishing the DTI data series after the merger.