Jamiu Olamilekan Badmus
Thesis: Trade Policy, Sustainable Value Chains, and Reshoring: National and Regional Perspectives from the UK
The European Union's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism entered its definitive phase on 1 January 2026, and the United Kingdom plans its own scheme from January 2027. Both policies make importers pay for the carbon embedded in goods such as iron and steel, aluminium, cement, fertilisers, and hydrogen. They were introduced to stop carbon leakage, the shifting of carbon intensive production to countries with weaker climate rules. Because the covered goods are inputs to many other industries, the new border costs will travel along supply chains and reshape trade patterns, production networks, and competition within UK and EU markets.
This project explores three directions. The first traces how border carbon costs spread through production networks and global value chains. It combines trade data with input-output tables in a quantitative multi-country trade model to separate direct effects on covered goods from indirect effects downstream and simulate policy alternatives. The second direction uses administrative and company-level data on British multinationals to ask how firms respond either by relocating production, cutting emissions at overseas plants, or redirecting sales to markets without border charges, comparing exposed and unexposed subsidiaries within the same firm to isolate the causal effect. The third direction asks how reduced import competition changes UK market structure, examining firm entry and exit, concentration, and price-cost margins, and whether protection from carbon-intensive imports redirects innovation toward cleaner technologies, using firm accounts, customs records, and patent data.
This project offers early evidence on how CBAM-induced cost shock propagates through production networks, reshapes multinational firm behaviour, and alters domestic market structure. The findings will inform the design of the UK scheme, the competition and innovation policies that should accompany it, and industry decisions on sourcing, investment, and decarbonisation.
Biography:
Jamiu Olamilekan Badmus is currently a PhD Candidate in Economics, funded through the ESRC Midlands Graduate School DTP Strategic Joint Studentship between the University of Birmingham and Aston University. His research interests connect international trade, environmental economics, and industrial organisation to inform the design of sustainability-focused trade policies and to examine the effects of such policy instruments on trade, investment, and global value chains. He is also a Junior Fellow at the Chair of Environmental and Mineral Economics (CEME) at the University of Orleans, France. Before his PhD, he worked within the Economic and Political Interactions Cluster at the United Nations University Institute on Comparative Regional Integration Studies (UNU-CRIS), Belgium. He was one of 15 awardees of the prestigious Erasmus Mundus Scholarship from 2023 to 2025 to pursue the Erasmus Mundus Joint Master's Degree in Economics of Globalisation and European Integration, studying across the University of Lille (France), Ghent University (Belgium), and the University of Bari Aldo Moro (Italy). He also holds an MSc (Distinction) and a BSc (first-class honours) in Economics from Tai Solarin University of Education, Nigeria. He has published in reputable journals, including the International Journal of Finance and Economics (ABS 3*) and Sustainable Development (Q1).Publications:
Adekoya, O. B., J. O. Badmus, and M. A. S. Al-Faryan. 2025. “ Geopolitical Risks and the Predictability of Green Investments: A GARCH-Based Mixed Data Sampling Approach.” International Journal of Finance & Economics 30, no. 4: 4343–4357. https://doi.org/10.1002/ijfe.3124.
Badmus, J. O., and S. O. Bisiriyu. 2025. “ Assessing Progress Toward SDG 7: A Threshold Analysis of Environmental Policy Stringency and Institutional Quality on Renewable Energy Consumption.” Sustainable Development 33, no. 6: 7915–7933. https://doi.org/10.1002/sd.70044.
Badmus, J. O., Alawode, O. S., & Bisiriyu, S. O. (2024). Green investments and inclusive growth: The case of the BRICS economies. Development and Sustainability in Economics and Finance, 2, 100019. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dsef.2024.100019
Department of Economics
Birmingham Business School, University of Birmingham & Aston Business School, Aston University
2026 Cohort
Jamiu Olamilekan Badmus | LinkedIn
Supervisors:
Professor Sami Bensassi (University of Birmingham)
Dr. Agelos Delis (Aston University)