Research On The Regulation Of Postal Universal Service In China

Post is an important national social utility. All countries in the world attach great importance to the postal reform and development, China also adopted the program about postal reform in 2005 and gradually implemented the program. The postal universal service is an important part of the national public service. It is an equal and universal social service which is provided for the public by the government and an important means of protecting the civil communication rights. On 1 October,2009, China began to implement the new "Postal Law", which proposed the system design of postal universal service clearly at the legislative level for the first time and made the relevant provisions with two-thirds of the terms. It reflects the national importance for the postal universal service. In this context, How to strengthen the regulation of the postal universal service to improve the service efficiency and enhance the operational capabilities of postal enterprise is the problem we need to make our efforts to work out during China's postal reform process.Based on the analysis of the postal reforms of some foreign countries, especially their universal service, the paper gives the definition of the postal universal service regulation, and organizes the writing in accordance with the four aspects, according to the research in the relevant industry of experts and scholars. The research starts with the government regulation theory and analyzes the actual situation in our country. It uses several methods such as comparative analysis, literature analysis and model analysis. It analyzes the status and the problems of the postal universal service in China. It summarizes the experiences and lessons by comparing to the universal service regulation of the European Union, the United States, Japan and other countries. In this paper, we discuss the compensation mechanism—the core issue of the postal universal service using the principal-agent theory. It theoretically proves that it is necessary giving the fund to the operator of postal universal service and feasible introducing competition to improve service efficiency. Finally the paper gives some suggestions from the system reform, legal system, compensation mechanisms and the regulation to improve the postal universal service in China. The suggestions mainly aim to promote the reform and found the entity company that operates universal service business, to build the compensation mechanism with universal service fund as the core, to strengthen the supervision of postal universal service from the aspects of quality and price, to improve supporting laws system for the new "Postal Law".Because there are few experts and scholars who do research on the postal universal service regulation in China, this paper just be a reference for other researchers to a certain extent. From the practical point of view, with the implementation of the new "Postal Law", the postal regulatory reform has entered a new stage and the postal universal services will be highly concerned. I hope the suggestions of this paper will provide reference for the regulators when they make decisions about the reform measures in the future.