We study the pricing and welfare implications of changing the VAT status of the national postal operator (NPO) from exempt to rated. We build a model where the NPO offers both single-piece and bulk mail to customers, some of them VAT rated, others VAT exempt. We solve for the optimal Ramsey prices under monopoly and under access-based competition for bulk mail. We finally perform numerical simulations in order to determine how prices, volumes and welfare might be affected by the change in the NPOs VAT status, both under monopoly and under access-based competition for bulk mail.
This paper deals with an analysis of the efficiency of delivery post offices from an estimated cost frontier. Our focus is to apply a robust non parametric approach for the cost frontier estimation, called the order-m frontier, based on the concept of "expected minimum cost" and to extend it to take into account some environmental variables. We illustrate our approach using a cross-section data set on delivery offices.
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