The Gains from Trade to Britain

The article, "Collateral Damage," from the Economist, reinforces the argument that the gains from trade are large to Britain, overall. A summary of the empirical evidence by Nick Crafts pegs the growth effects of the UK's membership in the EU estimates the growth effects of membership in the range of 8-10 percent. Importantly, these growth effects almost completely ignore the gains to consumers.
The article from the Economist also reinforces the flip side to trade, which is that the gains from trade are very unevenly distributed, and even leads to some regions, sectors, firms, and individuals losing out from trade. Most research supports the claim that employment and wages have suffered for manufacturing workers in the UK. Moreover, there have been impacts to mental health, and the UK has not done well to mitigate the effects of globalization through trade adjustment assistance. 
We will discuss in class how under certain "fairly reasonable" assumptions, free trade will lead to greater aggregate welfare than the alternative of highly restricted trade or autarky. However, the standard trade model we will start with, and even the Ricardian model we will continue with in Chapter 2 of the textbook, may mask the distributional consequences of trade. In Chapter 3 we will see some of the distributional consequences of trade in the short run with the "specific factors" model, and we will see how some of these consequences may persist in the long run with the Heckscher-Ohlin model in Chapter 4.