At the beginning of this year, Britain ended the Royal Mail's 370-year-old monopoly on letter delivery, becoming the fourth and largest European economy to embrace an open postal market. Many European governments, though, are dragging their feet on postal liberalization, despite an...

Deutsche Post's takeover of British logistics company Exel, announced this week, is just the latest acquisition in a global buying spree that began in 1997. That was the year the German government embarked on a plan to privatize the old state-owned postal...