China Postal Regulatory Reform Research

The natural monopoly industries with characteristic of network are important industries of national economy, such as telecommunications, electricity, gas, postal service, traffic and transportation, etc. Their development has close connection with economic growth, poverty reduction and sustainable development. Compared with the natural monopoly reformation tides of foreign countries, the reform pace of China's natural monopoly is comparatively slow, which is shown as that these departments are still regulated strictly by government to a great extent. The postal industry is a traditional natural monopoly industry with obvious network characteristics. With the changes of technology and consumption demand, the postal industry faces keen competition. Lasting loss has already threatened the postal industry's development. How to deregulate, introduce competition mechanism, and carry on regulatory reform becomes a problem must be solved urgently.The dissertation starts with technologic and economic characteristics of postal industry to correct people's traditional understanding on it. And puts forward that public welfare nature of universal service obligation, the compatibility of natural monopoly and administrative monopoly and the competitiveness of some postal business to offered basis on which we can make suitable regulation policy in ensuing chapters. Then the text introduces the natural monopoly theory and government's regulation theory emphatically, and analyzes the monopoly nature of the postal industry's road networks in terms of subadditivity of cost. While introducing natural monopoly, the dissertation introduces the concept of administrative monopoly and transform of natural monopolies caused by changes of technology and demand. According to the cost subadditivity of the natural monopoly, we should guarantee the existence of natural monopoly, but monopolizing rights could bring out drawbacks. Such as price discrimination, rent-seeking and other phenomenon harmful to interests of consumer. So the natural monopoly makes government fallinto one dilemma between social welfare and enterprise's interest. Then we have introduced government's regulation. After analyzing the origin and the goal of regulation, the text probes into the regulatory failure caused by improper regulation. And regulatory failure made people re-consider the rule of government's regulation. The regulation system should take reform.The main body of this dissertation is positive description of China's postal industry regulation system and the discussion about reform policy. Beginning from introducing current regulation system of China's postal industry, the text makes a survey on the development of postal regulation system in China, and points out the disadvantages and questions in the course of regulatory reform, that is administration mode and mixed functions between government and enterprises, the business drops and loss circulation, shortcomings of the financial subsidy and cross-subsidization, contradiction between listed capital and loss of universal service obligation, and drawbacks of legal frame, etc. These questions did not exist alone, they influenced each other. So we should construct an overall, rational, perfect regulation frame, so as to ensure the feasibility of the postal industry's regulatory reform in China. Then the dissertation compares the concrete methods of the foreign postal industry's regulatory reform and summarizes generality experiences, hoping to give enlightenments to China in some extent. The discussion course of this text makes every effort to relate with China's special national conditions closely. Foreign complete liberalization tide may be unsuitable to economic system of China at present. China's market mechanism is still weak after all. In developing stage, restrictions of capital still exist, so it should be progressive to introduce the competition and deregulation. After the discussion of theory and reality, the dissertation carries on comparatively systematic analysis and research to the concrete countermeas...