Even though trade preferences are offered as a way to increase the value of developing countries’ exports and make them more diversified, there is widespread scepticism about whether they in general have succeeded in achieving this stated goal. A common argument is that the share of imports to, for example, the EU from preference-receiving countries has decreased over time. As discussed in Persson and Wilhelmsson (2007), this may not be a very good argument, since trade could very well have developed slowly due to other factors so that the situation would have been even worse without preferences. A bigger concern is perhaps reports that traders do not even request preferential treatment, but instead export under MFN tariffs, to the extent that they export at all. For example, Inama (2003) and Brenton (2003) both note that preferential treatment under the Everything But Arms initiative was requested for less than 50 percent of exports from non-ACP LDCs in 2001, even though this offers duty-free access for practically all goods and is the best system on offer for these countries. Such low utilization rates may be a strong indicator that preferences are either very hard to use in practice, or that the extra value they could transfer is not big enough to make it worthwhile.