USA shipping: why so expensive?

As you may be aware, postal rates to the USA increased significantly from July 2020. The key driver for this originated from the Postal Union Congress in September 2019 where significant changes were made to the then, multilateral billing system which had been in place for decades. Donald Trump warned that the USA would pull out of the multilateral organisation unless it amended its rules to allow the USA to set its own ‘self-declared’ postal rates. In the process, the United States Postal Service were given the opportunity to increase prices for mail services into the USA at their discretion with effect from July 1st 2020. This resulted in significant increases from USPS to all international mail authorities.

The impact of this was that, effectively overnight, in most cases, it became more cost-effective to send via a courier service instead of the traditional postal service.

Thank you to my logistics partners for taking the time to explain this