IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/topchp/978-0-387-29744-6_5.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Questioning the Monopoly-Supported Postal USO in Developing Countries

In: Progress toward Liberalization of the Postal and Delivery Sector

Author

Listed:
  • Charles Kenny

    (The World Bank)

Abstract

The monopoly-supported universal service obligation (USO) is usually defended on the grounds that the monopoly allows for cross-subsidy in letter services that in turn allows universal access to a service of great importance to all. This paper argues that letter delivery (as opposed to other services that may be provided by post offices) is not in universal demand in poor countries, that the size of the market in developing countries is such that USOs could not be met under the monopoly model, and that the monopoly carries heavy costs for sector development and consumer welfare. It proposes in the place of the postal USO a competitive approach involving universal access to a range of services that poor people have a need to access.

Suggested Citation

  • Charles Kenny, 2006. "Questioning the Monopoly-Supported Postal USO in Developing Countries," Topics in Regulatory Economics and Policy, in: Michael A. Crew & Paul R. Kleindorfer (ed.), Progress toward Liberalization of the Postal and Delivery Sector, chapter 0, pages 75-87, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:topchp:978-0-387-29744-6_5
    DOI: 10.1007/978-0-387-29744-6_5
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Urs Trinkner & Bernd Holznagel & Christian Jaag & Helmut Dietl & Haller Andreas, 2012. "Möglichkeiten eines gemeinsam definierten Universaldienst Post und Telekommunikation aus ökonomischer und juristischer Sicht," Studies and Reports, Swiss Economics, pages 1-79, September.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:topchp:978-0-387-29744-6_5. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.