Postal and Delivery Services

When Postmaster General Creswell penned his concern about the impact 2 of electronic diversion on his postal organization, the year was 1872. General Creswell, it turned out, fretted unnecessarily. Facsimile did not achieve commercial viability until roughly a century after his tenure as Postmaster General and today that technology is fading rapidly from the communication scene. Moreover, it never appears to have significantly affected physical letter volumes. However, if General Creswell were leading a major postal organization today, he likely would feel threatened by the potential of Internet communication to cause electronic diversion of physical mail. Should recent technology developments cause the oft-predicted (but so far incorrect) inflection point that would mark the beginning of declining mail volumes. the implications from a management standpoint will be profound. The relatively fixed nature of postal costs suggest that volume declines must be offset though improved productivity, reduced cost of inputs, revenue from new products that share common costs, or reduced level of universal service.

Offering insights to problems in postal and delivery economics, this book covers issues including international postal policy, the universal service obligation, regulation, competition, entry, the role of scale and scope economies, the nature and role of cost analysis in postal service, productivity, and interaction of law and economics.

Liberalization and the Universal Service Obligation.- 1. Putty-Putty, Putty-Clay or Humpty-Dumpty?.- 2. Funding the Universal Service Obligation under Liberalisation.- 3. Assessing Liberalization in Context.- 4. Sustainability of USO in a Liberalized Postal Market.- 5. A Comparison of the Burden of Universal Service in Italy and the United States.- 6. The Welfare Economics of Universal Service Standards and Service Quality.- 7. Two-Tier Pricing under Liberalization.- Cost and Demand Studies.- 8. Postal Services Cost Modeling.- 9. An Econometric Study of Cost Elasticity in the Activities of Post Office Counters.- 10. Mail Demand in the Long and Short Term.- 11. Productivity and the Substitution between Labor and Capital in Postal Organizations.- 12. Disaggregated Letter Traffic Demand in the UK.- Strategic Issues.- 13. People and Privatization.- 14. Modern Postal Reform Laws.- 15. Evaluation of a Public Post Office: A Canadian Experience.- 16. Saturday Delivery: Who Provides It? Who Needs It?.- 17. Postal Administrations and Non-Postal Products.- 18. USPS Finances: Is there a financially viable future.- 19. Postal Infrastructures and Economic Development.- 20. Assessment and Responses of Postal Sector Operators to Electronic Diversions.