Who gets the money from my stamp when I mail a letter or a postcard (via Mailform or Docupost for example) from the UK to the USA or vice versa? If it’s the UK, how does the airline or the postman in the US profit on my letter? Also, Are they obliged to deliver it for free once it reaches the other country because they receive no direct payment from me? How can international mail help recipient countries make money?
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the “Universal Postal Union” is a UN agency that deals with exactly who gets what money/how much postage is required. Here’s an [ELI5 friendly video from Half As Interesting](https://youtu.be/dHhkNwE7pr8) that explains it in detail.
Who did you buy the postage from?
Who did you pay? Yes, they would be the ones who gets your money.
The USPS gets no government funding.
Does the sending mail company pay for the shipment over seas. I don’t know.
You buy the stamp at the post office, no?
Have a look at International Reply Coupons. If i send a letter overseas,and want to provide postage for a return letter, I can do battle at the USPO to find someone that has heard of them and can sell me the correct number of them to include in my correspondence. I only ever did this to receive ( Amateur Radio) QSL cards to confirm contacts with other station in shithole countries where they were known to rip open envelopes looking for US greenbacks. The original “Ponzi Scheme” was Ponzi pretending to manipulate the exchange rates of IRCs.
The quick answer is that your postage pays your local postal service, but they subcontract the destination postal service. Every country pair has their own arrangement, and typically theres only one actual cash transfer direction since that’s the direction more mail is going.
Whomever you bought the stamp from earns the profit.
When it comes to international post, most countries have reciprocal agreements – we agree to accept post from other countries postal systems, and in return they accept post from ours.
In some cases where there is a large imbalance in the amount of mail being sent, there can be additional fees paid by one postal system to another, so they will effectively earn a certain percentage of the postage on an envelope.
Check out this super relevant episode of Planet Money: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/08/01/634737852/episode-857-the-postal-illuminati
It is the story of a person discovering and standing up to the UPU.
The Universal Postal Union is part of the United Nations, and it’s made up of representatives from the Postal Services of 192 countries.
What the UPU has created is almost like a reverse trade barrier. And this is true for virtually every country in the world. There is often an incentive to buy something that ships from another country instead of your own.
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Most national mail services have an arrangement with the other countries where they handle incoming mail for no charge. They usually find that the costs on both sides balance out so there is no point in cross charging.
This is (or was) also the case for roaming mobile charging. If you temporarily move out of the area covered by your phone network and connect to a different provider (e.g. on holiday) , then you keep paying your original provider and the other network doesn’t charge. I used to work for BT, Vodafone and EE and we never transferred charges between companies. Somebody worked out that the costs generally balanced out and doing the paperwork would just incur an admin cost that wasnt necessary.
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