Market Entry and Exit Barriers among Vietnamese Enterprises: Evidence from Business Registration Data

This study examines market entry and exit barriers among Vietnamese enterprises through a longitudinal analysis of administrative business-registration data for 2015–2025. Rather than treating business closure as a single event, the paper distinguishes five observable transition states: new registration, re-entry, temporary suspension, pending dissolution, and completed dissolution. This distinction is important because temporary suspension is a reversible adjustment and cannot be interpreted as firm death. The evidence shows a marked expansion of formal business dynamism. New registrations rose from 94,754 in 2015 to 195,147 in 2025, while re-entries increased from 21,506 to 102,327. Yet exit-side adjustment intensified at an even faster pace: temporary suspensions increased more than sevenfold and became the dominant component of reported market withdrawal after 2020. The exit-to-entry pressure ratio rose sharply during the COVID-19 period and remained elevated in 2023–2024, before declining in 2025 as entry and re-entry reached record levels. Small-capital enterprises account for close to 90 percent of both entry and exit states in 2024, while new registrations remain geographically concentrated in the Southeast and Red River Delta. The findings suggest that Vietnam’s principal enterprise-policy challenge has shifted from formal incorporation alone toward post-entry survival, reactivation, financing resilience, and orderly exit. The study contributes a multi-state measurement framework for interpreting administrative registration data and cautions against using suspension or pending dissolution as direct proxies for permanent business failure.