Six members of Congress participated in ALI’s Trade Policy Forum discussing a new paradigm for trade policy.  Thought leaders from think tanks, business and civil society, along with senior congressional staff joined the discussion.

ALI hosted a roundtable on trade preferences and development with congressional staff, NGO and private sector participants, as well as participants from NGOs, including Bread for the World and The Alliance for Hunger.  Speakers were Kimberly Elliott from the Center for Global Development, Eric Biel from the Fair Labor Association, and Stephanie Lester, from Gap, Inc. The discussion centered on how the U.S. Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) can be improved and expanded. Several key conclusions emerged from the discussion:

ALI convened this group to discuss Trade and WTO reform, using Paula Stern’s piece “Reforming and Strengthening the WTO: America’s Path back to Global Leadership,” as a conversation starter. The conversation moved from a discussion on WTO reform, to a discussion of China’s role in the global trading system, to a discussion of how politicians can talk about trade.

The American Leadership Initiative hosted two roundtables to consider whether and how corruption and rule-of-law could be addressed as a major US foreign policy concern. We agreed that this issue is gaining prominence and relevance, with an increasing number of people and organizations, in the United States and elsewhere, seeking to address the challenges of Rule of Law and corruption in developing countries. There are also many overlapping facets to the issue – ineffective judicial systems, impunity for public officials, longstanding corruption in procurement, state-owned enterprises, customs agencies and regulators, etc.