Special Post Office, Privatization and Universal Service Obligation Costs

要約

By using the empirical method, this paper analyzes Japan’s “special” post office and evaluates universal service obligation (USO) costs.With empirical analysis, we obtained the following results.First, the cost of the special post office is about 9.8% higher than that of the “ordinal” post office.Second, USO costs are about 348 billion yen, accounting for 17.3% of total revenues generated by ordinal postal services.Also, approximately 81% of total prefectures are creating deficits.Third, if the special post office were abolished, USO costs would be reduced to 273 billion yen.Last, even with the privatization of the Japan Post, USO costs are still large at 251 billion yen.These results imply that reorganization of the post office network will be necessary.