Emerging Competition in Postal and Delivery Services

Emerging Competition in Postal and Delivery Services brings together practitioners, postal administrators, the courier industry, regulators, academic economists and lawyers to examine important policy and regulatory issues facing the postal and delivery industries. This volume reviews such topics as cost and productivity analysis, universal service and entry, demand analysis and the structure of postal payment system, price regulation and competition.

Legal and Institutional Perspectives.- 1 GATS and Physical Delivery Networks.- 2 Postal Pipeline Liberalization: the Beginning of the End for the Uniform Tariff?.- 3 The Swiss Postal Law of 1998: Is It Worth the Monopoly Protection?.- 4 Postal Joint Ventures and EC Competition Law Considerations: A Case Study Based on a Venture Between the Nordic PPOs.- 5 Postal Service and the Telecommunications Analogy.- Cost and Productivity Analysis.- 6 Productivity and Technical Change in a Public Service Enterprise.- 7 Empirical Estimation of Incremental Costs for the U.S. Postal Service.- 8 Technico-Economic Analysis of the Costs of Outside Work in Postal Delivery.- 9 Proprietary Information Networks and the Scope of the Firm: the Case of International Courier and Small Package Services in Japan.- Universal Service and Entry.- 10 An Analysis of the Potential for Cream Skimming in the United States Residential Delivery Market.- 11 Mail Goes Where the Money Is: A Study of Rural Mail Delivery in the U.S..- 12 Managing the Universal Service Obligation.- 13 Estimating the Cost of the Universal Service Obligation in Postal Service.- 14 Authorization Procedures in The Postal Sector: Possible Lessons from Other Sectors for Entry Regulation.- Demand Analysis and the Structure of Postal Payment Systems.- 15 How Important Have Price and Quality of Service Been to Mail Volume Growth?.- 16 The Future of Targeted Communication in Finland.- 17 Demand for Letters in Portugal.- 18 Transaction Costs of Alternative Postage Payment and Evidencing Systems.- 19 Transaction Cost Economics of Postage Payment and Mailer-Post Interface.- Price Regulation.- 20 Postal Worksharing: Welfare, Technical Efficiency, and Pareto Optimality.- 21 Price-Cap Regulation in the Postal Sector: An International Comparisonand Assessment.