one of the main messages of the joint report was that trade openness or trade growth alone may not be sufficient to end extreme poverty the extreme poor face specific constraints due to the fact that they tend to work in rural areas in the informal sector live in fragile states and face gender inequality that can limit their ability to benefit from wider tradeinduced economic gains it continues to focus on the linkages between trade and extreme poverty rather than the broader distributional effects of trade and the agenda of shared prosperity