Dr Marta Santamaria wins civil service analysis prize

This report, by Teve Markson, was first published in Civil Service World on 20 December 2024.

An academic who explored the impact of internal barriers to trade within the UK has been awarded the inaugural Department for Business and Trade analysis prize.

Marta Santamaria, who is an assistant professor in the University of Warwick’s Department of Economics, was presented with the £10,000 prize by DBT permanent secretary Gareth Davies.

Open to students and people in the first five years of a career in academia, industry or think tanks, the prize asks for a written paper of no more than 10 pages, on any topic relevant to the work of DBT.

Santamaria's paper, Disunited Kingdom? Frictions in the Domestic Market for Goods, used data on road freight and a novel analytical approach to estimate “border effects” within the UK.

DBT said her work “highlights a potentially important barrier to pan-UK growth and identifies a number of areas for further policy research on institutional, firm-level, and market factors that may drive it”. It said teams in the department plan to use the work as an important part of the evidence base on the functioning of the UK internal market.

DBT permanent secretary Davies said: “The DBT analysis prize is the first of its kind in government, and will help continue to strengthen the department's work with researchers to develop thoughtful and robust economic policy.

“Marta’s paper explores real life impacts of internal barriers to trade and identifies how external factors play a part in it, and I’m pleased that DBT officials will use her research to help unblock barriers through policy as part of our wider plan to drive economic growth around the country.”

Santamaria said she was "incredibly honoured and humbled” to receive the award and that she hopes that this recognition will spark further work on how to achieve a stronger domestic market that can help unlock the UK’s growth potential.

Through her work, she uncovered substantial barriers across the four nations in the UK – with trade across nations on average 53% lower than within nations, and the largest reductions in trade observed between Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Her estimates imply that crossing the average country border is equivalent to economic agents having to pay a 16.32% ad-valorem tariff on the price of the goods.

Santamaria also identified fragmented domestic transport networks as a factor, with the lack of direct road connections between English and Welsh regions, for example, increasing the distance that a truck must cover when crossing the Welsh-English border.

Davies announced plans for the prize at the DBT Analysis & Evidence conference in November 2023. Entrants were asked to submit a paper on any DBT policy area.

Speaking to CSW about the prize at the conference last year, DBT's head of analysis Ben Cropper said the idea of the award was to encourage academics to "write me the paper that I didn't know I needed to commission".

“We're hoping it both brings to our attention lots of work we otherwise wouldn't have seen,” he said, “but also gets people to think, ahead of time, ‘I might well go into that research area, so that I can have a chance of winning that prize’.”

• Photo: Gareth Davies and prize winner Marta Santamaria. Credit: DBT