Abstract

This paper provides an updated description of the Italian postal market which will be liberalized on January 1, 2011. The article reviews the main features of the postal market, illustrating the structural untenable of universal service and focusing on service at date and time certain delivery. It also illustrates the peculiar way in which competition has developed in Italy, by analyzing the existence of political prices for a significant proportion of postal products that represented the main obstacle to the development of competition. It also proposed a reform of the financing mechanism, through the reorganization of the compensation fund, which keeps the state transfer, but includes new players to his contribution. Finally, we discussed a more general regulatory reform of the postal industry, with the allocation of technical regulation functions to an independent authority.