Research On Postal Reform's International Comparison And Evaluation

The reform of the Monopoly profession has been drawing more and more attention as China's economic restructuring are further deepened. It is entitled as a major reform task by the 16th National Congress that"monopoly industry must be changed by introducing competition and improving economic returns."Postal reform that was analyzed and studied here is one of the monopoly industry's typical and representativeness example. It is theory of meaning and practical significance that we systematically induce and research the experience of postal reform.1. Reviews of relevant theory and researchPostal reform should be processing on the basis of theory and research. Postal industry is a typical public goods. The postal enterprises could partly enjoy these profits produced by themselves which characterizes postal services business as a private goods. However, other parties besides captioned enterprises could also get benefits which marks its nonexcludability. To be more exactly, postal industry could be defined as a Quasi Public Goods, its essential nature decides that postal services should be provided by state-owned departments.At the same time, universal service theory sets an objective that is to ensure the public, almost all users in all territories could afford the reasonable price for quality postal services, and in order to achieve this goal, enterprises within the industry should have well-covered network which emphasizes postal industry's natural monopoly and highlights the necessity of being monopoly. On the other hand, with the development of contestable markets theory and natural monopoly, some scientists began to realize that features scope economy carrying by postal services network is neither compulsory nor necessary.Under such circumstances, the pursuit for social efficiency and high quality services non-evitable lead to the deregulation and introduction of competition mechanisms in postal industry. Certainly government had to set principles and rules accordingly to ensure fair competition. Western scholars proposed incentive regulation from the prospective of government regulation, such as price cap, regional ruler competition, concession and bidding system, which had positive effects on enterprises in terms of cost control and efficiency enhancement.2. Analysis on the typical modes of national postal reformAustralia post industry has gone through 3 times reforms which brought more competition to the letter market and helped to build up a kind of new relationship between postal corporations and the government whose focus has been shifted from routine supervision to strategic control. Australia Post now has been thoroughly commercialized and entered into the virtuous development track.Swiss Post has stepped into the world's leading class benefited from its unique reform through which monopoly has been broken and market has been opened up.The similar reform also happened in New Zealand. After a series of tough restructuring, New Zealand Post has transformed from a loss-suffering, overstuffed, and ineffective government department to a quality service provider operating with profits and efficiency. To be concluded, the reform in New Zealand was a process of introducing market competition mechanism and commercial management to state-owned postal enterprises.The U.K. established a complete regulatory system consisting of postal law, Post Industry Regulatory Commission and Postal Users Council in order to present a fair playing field and protect users'common interest.German Post started the reform by clarifying its operating structure, rights and obligations at the very beginning, and then deepened the reform in means of adjusting marketing strategy with the development of global markets, at last it ended with successfully brand set-up and significantly enhancement of quality of service.3. Comparison of international Postal reform model and the enlightenment to China PostMany countries are circumspect and careful with the postal reform, since they are well recognized that the post services business plays an important role in the national economy. A postal reform in a country should be performed with its basic condition as well as international situation. At the same time, the liberalization of a country's postal market need to be accordant with the development level of domestic post industry, local government's capability of supervision and the market's capacity should also be taken into consideration.According to the incomplete statistics from the UPU, postal business is usually run by the combination of government and enterprises, which accounts for 30% of all its member states. Postal enterprises in most countries are in forms of state owned public or state owned joint-stock; only in a few countries they have been privatized.Each country's postal enterprises are obligated to provide universal services to its national users at an affordable price, and on the other hand, they have to suffer the high costs of operating the national-wide network. In such situation, governments issues relevant laws and preferential policies targeting to solve this problem. Generally, measures that are commonly taken include permits of industrial monopoly, provision of fiscal subsidies and tax preference, set-up of indemnification fund and other policy supports.For Chinese postal industry, narrowing down postal franchising rights, gradually opening the market, introducing strategic investors and changing single structure of property rights are all necessary and important ways, if we are eyeing on long-term and sustainable development.4. Analysis on China Post's ReformChina post's reform has referred to many different typical modes of other countries, and the development of our post industry has gone through several phases, such as the segmentation of posts from telecom operation, separation of government functions from enterprise management, commercialization and recombination.With benefits from the reform, postal enterprises are now operating with clear strategy and a preliminary supervision system has been established. However, because of the principal agency relationship in current supervisory framework, the distribution of information among market player and executives is asymmetry.In order to enhance the service efficiency of domestic postal enterprises, especially the universal services efficiency, the supervision system need to be further improved.5. Static evaluation of Chinese Postal ReformChinese postal reformation is at critical stage now, so we should sum up both experience and defect based on which the reform will be continuingly taken forward. With the purpose stated above, this article analyses features of Chinese post industry and relevant theories, proposes to apply the quantitative evaluation method. The article use SCP method study from market structure, market behavior and market performance that create postal reform KPI and relative model than apply fuzzy evaluation and analytical hierarchy process concluded the static evaluation of postal reform. The result showed that China's marketing performance is very good, basically reached it's target that breakup of monopoly and introduced competition, but as postal market are enslaved to allocative efficiency and technical merit. The post market showed low market performance and low market behavior that is what we need to improve in the future reform.6. Dynamic evaluation of Chinese Postal ReformAs SCP study can only show macroscopic level reform result so the article used data envelopment analysis' CRS model, VRS model and Malquist compared with 31 international post company's reform based on China post's 2003-2009 panel data. The result showed that the reform improved post's internal management, allocative efficiency, synthesis technique efficiency, scale efficiency and pure technical efficiency on microcosmic level.7. Main innovation in the articleThere are three main innovations in the article: 1.The article collected and concluded most of countries' reform model and experience in the world and then the article showed future directivity for China post's reform. 2. From macro-analysis the article use SCP, market structure, market behavior, market performance, multi-tiered analysis and fuzzy evaluation created a four level evaluation system. 3. From micro-analysis the article use data envelopment analysis, CRS model, VRS model and Malquist compared with 31 international post company's reform based on China post's 2003-2009 panel data static evaluated China Post's Reform.