Abstract
The arrival and diffusion of the commercial Internet has been one of the main causes of change in the postal sector in the last two decades. Its impact has been rapid and it has gone straight to the core of postal operators’ (POs’) activities: the mail business. Electronic communications, especially email, available at zero marginal cost and relatively high quality, have quickly changed consumers’ and businesses’ communicating habits, leading to substitution away from traditional physical mails. Although substantial postal volumes remain, for reasons that will later be discussed, it has certainly hit the sector’s volume and profitability dramatically.
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Notes
- 1.
Since there is no common definition of the parcel and express market in terms of size, weight and service characteristics, the charts shown can be used to comment on relative growth and not to compare the exact figures.
- 2.
The UK telecommunications’ prices appear to decline less than in other EU countries only because the liberalization process was started before, therefore a part of the price decline happened before the year 2000.
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Parcu, P.L., Silvestri, V. (2017). Lessons from the Postal Sector to Telecommunications and Vice Versa. In: Crew, M., Parcu, P., Brennan, T. (eds) The Changing Postal and Delivery Sector. Topics in Regulatory Economics and Policy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46046-8_2
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