Senior fellow Kimberly Elliott is quoted in the Wall Street Journal on duty-free quota-free and the G-20 summit.
From the article:
South Korean negotiators say they wanted to approach development from a pragmatic, what-works approach. They laid out nine broad areas they considered crucial for fast, sustainable growth, including macroeconomic stability, agricultural investment, liberalized trade, improved skills and technical advice. None are controversial, but they represented a different strategy than that of the Group of Eight industrialized nations—the predecessor of the G-20—which routinely announced costly foreign-aid initiatives, which were then largely ignored.
But the South Koreans quickly found themselves in a bind. Without splashy new aid initiatives, their efforts were unlikely to get much attention. And even the modest concrete programs that the members did back ran into trouble.
European nations backed a plan to eliminate tariffs and quotas for imports from the world's poorest nations, a proposal that dates to a 2000 United Nations effort. Kimberly Elliott, a trade specialist at the Center for Global Development, a Washington think tank, calls the proposal, a "unique opportunity to deliver on the longstanding promise to promote trade as a tool for development in poor and marginalized countries."