Political leaders work in different locations during their careers. Their movements are claimed to promote economic development and strengthen their leadership capacity. However, empirical evidence about the impact of political leader rotations on economic development factors is still limited. This paper chooses the political leader rotations in Vietnam as a case study and analyses its impact on exports from 2005 to 2018. Empirical results using fixed-effects estimator imply that if an appointed province’s party secretary is from central agencies, the province will have better export performance.