Departmental news

Wajma Zazai, who studied on our Law 3 Year LLB, and graduated in 2022, has written our latest Lacuna article titled: 'The Screen: Watching Afghanistan suffer from afar.' Wajma was awarded the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge Scholarship from the Honourable Society of the Middle Temple to support her Bar Vocational Studies at City, University of London.

Warwick Law School students recently presented the results of a legal research project into social housing allocation inequality conducted as part of Warwick Law in the Community’s Strategic Social Justice Clinic. The presentation outlined the complex issues surrounding change of circumstance applications to Coventry City Council’s social housing team. The outcomes of the student’s work have resulted in resources that will be used by a local law centre in helping some of the most vulnerable people in Coventry secure adequate and timely assistance in their housing need.

A new study from Warwick Economics has revealed that a region trades with itself much more than with other regions in the same country, or with regions in different countries.

Dr Marta Santamaria and co-authors Dr. Jaume Ventura (CREi/University Pompeu Fabra) and Dr. Ugur Yesilbayraktar (University of Duisburg-Essen) analysed a newly-built dataset* of European regional trade flows to explore trade patterns within and across country borders. Based on the European Road Freight Transport survey, the data cover trade in goods among 269 regions from 24 European countries between 2011 and 2017. This trade is disaggregated into 12 different industries covering all agriculture, mining and manufacturing.

Out of all shipments in the sample, 40% had a destination inside the same region as their origin (home trade), while 41% had a destination in a different region but within the same country (country trade). Surprisingly, only 19% of trade flows were between regions in different countries (foreign trade).

However, when correcting for economic size – accounting for the fact that regional markets are smaller than country markets, which are smaller than foreign markets - the researchers found enormous differences in the magnitudes of the different types of trade. Their findings revealed that, on average, trade levels within the same region are 42 times higher than the average trade between two regions in the same country. In turn, two regions in the same country trade almost ten times more than two regions in different countries.

The researchers examined whether geographic and national borders could explain these differences. They found that these two factors together accounted for two-thirds of the variation in trade flows. For example, a 1% increase in geographical distance between regions is associated with a reduction in trade of 1.2%.

However, distance could not explain why trade shipments within regions were so much larger than across regional borders. The researchers found this was instead at least partly due to the impact of subnational governments. Their analysis showed that political borders within countries (dividing regions with some form of self-government) significantly reduced trade, while purely administrative regional borders (dividing regions created for statistical purposes without any form of political power) had no effect on trade.

Commenting on the research, Dr Santamaria said: “While we know much about trade across countries thanks to the availability of detailed customs data, we know much less about trade within countries. This paper is the first to systematically explore trade patterns across and within European regions.”

“There are many exciting opportunities for future research in this area. For example, how does the behaviour or autonomy level of local governments account for the effect of political borders on reducing trade flows across regions? How is trade between regions impacted by factors such as migration flows or foreign direct investment?"

“Constructing similar models for other social and cultural interactions such as travel, tourism and collaborative working would also help us form a better picture of how European citizens interact with each other.”

* The construction of this new dataset is described in Santamaria et al., 2021.

Read the full article

Exploring European regional trade by Marta Santamaria, Jaume Ventura and Uğur Yeşilbayraktar is forthcoming in the Journal of International Economics. The corrected proof was published in April 2023.

Marta Santamaria is Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at Warwick. View her staff profile.

ANNOUNCING: A RENEWED COLLABORATION WITH UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK – Coventry Biennial

Plans to grow the University of Warwick Innovation Campus Stratford-upon-Avon at Wellesbourne have taken an important step forward. Stratford-on-Avon District Council has approved a plan to guide the long-term growth of the Campus.

Press release (4 July 2023)

The Warwick Wows celebrate amazing work, projects, and achievements at the University. The Law School’s Dr Alison Struthers won the award for her work on the School Tasking Project, an exciting outreach project enabling young people to learn about interesting aspects of the law and making it more accessible for them.

Dr Alex Baker has won a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship to explore "Robust Nanoprobe Tools to Dissect Glycan Binding of Snake Venoms". Read more...

Researchers at WMG, University of Warwick’s Forensics & Advanced Characterisation of Batteries Group, have secured £1.5m funding for materials analysis in multiple format batteries.

The funding, from the University of Warwick’s Academic Equipment Fund and the High Value Manufacturing Catapult, will be used to purchase a Plasma Focused Ion Beam (PFIB) microscope. The microscope is key to the accelerated development of new battery chemistries, providing unique access to the critical interfaces within battery cells that dictate best performance. This will be instrumental in developing new materials for better batteries, regardless of their end use application.

This PFIB will be the first specifically configured microscope dedicated to battery research in the world, allowing researchers at WMG to inform battery manufacturing, answer key scientific questions and link with industry and growing supply chains.

There is increased recognition in the battery community that the integration of new chemistries needed for the UK Government’s 2030 electric vehicle battery targets will require integrating new manufacturing processes with advanced microscopic characterisation. The PFIB has been specifically designed to address the critical challenges of studying alkali-based battery systems and will provide unique insights needed for the development of next generation batteries.

The performance of battery materials is dictated by the stability, efficiency and functionality of the interfaces, i.e. the solid electrolyte interphase (SEI) at the anode and oxygen-induced cathode-electrolyte interface (CEI) at the cathode. Attempts to analyse these interfaces, in order to determine structure and chemistry, is seriously compromised using conventional techniques by the extreme air-sensitivity, beam sensitivity and the high volatility of certain species present. The specially configured PFIB microscope will address these issues.

WMG is one of seven HVM Catapult centres in the UK and is the lead centre for transport electrification. Investment in this PFIB is part of a range of equipment investments by the HVM Catapult and the University of Warwick to maintain WMG’s leading position in battery technology.

The PFIB has already secured interest from the Faraday Institution and from the Royal Academy of Engineering’s Lord Bhattacharyya Education Programme. Starting in the Autumn, a student will use this for a project entitled “The development of a new multi-modal capability for investigating the performance-controlling interfaces and microstructures that underpin operation of battery materials.”

The Lord Bhattacharyya Education Programme provides up to 90 bursaries annually for local students from lower socio-economic backgrounds. The objectives for the scheme include encouraging a greater number of young people from a more diverse range of backgrounds, raising their aspirations and skill levels. Moreover, it supports the growth of a science and engineering skills base for the UK.

The project will make extensive use of the new system to develop strategies for studying the degradation of buried interfaces and structure dynamics in state-of-the-art high Ni NMC cathodes as a function of cycle ageing i.e., the evolution of the cathode-electrolyte interphases. The platform provides some unique opportunities for developing powerful new ways to characterise these controlling interfaces and will form the basis for the project. Preliminary research will commence in October 2023. The project will be advertised online for interested applicants to apply – the studentships page, Jobs.ac.uk, FindAPhD.com and the Doctoral College website.

Find out more about WMG’s electrochemical research here: Electrochemical Materials (warwick.ac.uk)

The new PFIB microscope will be based in WMG’s Advanced Material Manufacturing Centre (AMMC).

Dr Evelina Liarou has won a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship to explore the visualization of fundamental chemical reactions that govern the formation and behaviour of soft matter. Learn moreLink opens in a new window.