Unilateral reductions will open new frontiers for arms limitation and reinforce bilateral agreements.

Among those principles we can cite free trade, open markets and tariff reductions.

(b) Reduction of Open-ended Working Group conference servicing costs (US$ 50,000 per meeting);

In that connection, the World Conference on Disaster Reduction, which opened today in Kobe, Japan, is a timely event.

The World Conference on Disaster Reduction was opened on 18 January 2005 by the representative of the Secretary-General, the Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs.

Some developing countries had adopted conscious polices for good governance, economic development, poverty reduction and open trade in response to the Doha conference.

The creation by the Economic and Social Council of an intergovernmental committee on disaster reduction response open to the main stakeholders and actors concerned was also justified.

The controversy about the effects of trade openness on poverty reduction has now seesawed between “it is good” and “it is bad” to reach the more nuanced position that “it is good if the right complementary policies are adopted”.

Thus, the conventional wisdom that there was a direct correlation between trade openness and poverty reduction must be reassessed, and the critical policy issue appeared to consist in improving the composition of exports by building competitive and dynamic export capabilities.

As Dani Rodrik observed, studies based on actual policies of openness such as the reduction of a country's average level of tariff and non-tariff barriers do not suggest any systematic positive relationship with its rate of economic growth.