Page 384 - 100 Reflections that Crafted Geneva International_V-Petrovsky_private special edition

100 Reflections that Crafted Geneva International

this institution which is quite unique among international organizations. It is a
shinning example of successful international cooperation bearing tangible
results. It is also an example of adaptibility to changing circumstances that
should be emulated.

This anniversary is commemorated today in conjunction with World Post
Day under the theme "Partnerships for the Future: Putting Customers First."
The reasons that led to the foundation of the Organization in 1874 remain
valid to this day. One of the major accomplishments of the UPU has been to
allow postal administrations to develop and integrate new products and
services into the international postal network. In this way, such services as
registered letters, postal money orders, international reply coupons, small
packets, postal parcels and expedited mail service, have been made available to
the great majority of the world's citizens.

At the same time, the environment in which postal administrations must
now operate is undergoing profound changes. First of all, postal services face
more competition both from private operators who try to tailor their special
offering to the public, and from the newly emerging electronic technologies
which offer alternatives to physical mail delivery. It might be useful to
underline at this point that there is also a growing disparity within
industrialized countries between those who are sufficiently well-off trained to
benefit from the technological revolution and those who are only further
marginalized by this process.

Postal administrations which aim at an all-inclusive service might play a
role in moderating these new forms of discrimination. Under these
circumstances, postal administrations will have no alternative but to reform
and innovate. Legislative and institutional reforms in terms of operational
machinery, network structure and technical resources have been undertaken in
many countries with the aim to ensure progress of postal services.

It is worth mentioning that with the globalization of economy, more goods
and services are being moved which affects the postal business on an
international scale. Many of the problems facing postal administrations are
global, or at the very least, regional in nature. Globality is required when
problems are fundamentally transnational. In case of UPU it means that such
problems can be considered through globality of researchers' input, data
gathering, monitoring phenomena, and information exchange. Global actions
should be complimented at all other levels of peoples’ interaction. However, in

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