The report of the WTO working group which has been studying the relationship between trade and investment for two years is due next month. But the group is expected to seek an extension. Meanwhile, a concerted move is afoot by much of the developed world to transfer these negotiations to the WTO.

It would have taken away from governments the right to deny multinationals the right to invest in their country, or force any conditions on them which discriminated between them and domestic producers -- for instance, export obligations or indigenous content, etc. It would have earned legal rights to the same treatment for MNCs as to domestic firms.

The MAI collapsed in the OECD for many reasons: the inability of governments to agree, concerns about loss of cultural sovereignty among countriessuch as France and Canada and, most importantly perhaps, opposition by developed-country NGOs who used the Internet to lethal effect to publicise their case against the MAI.

These NGOs saw the MAI as a threat to the sovereignty of their governments. They were worried that it would limit their governments' right to regulate the environment and labour conditions.

Hitherto only developing countries had agonised about loss of sovereignty as a result of trade and investment liberalisation.

In the WTO, even the decision to undertake a study on the relationship between trade and investment was perceived by countries such as India as a prelude to insinuating this agreement into the WTO.

India, apart from worrying about the radical liberalisation the MAI would have forced, disliked the idea because the developing world had no say in its framing.

But the Government lost face two years ago at the first ministerial meeting of the WTO in Singapore by opposing a study on investment tooth and nail, only to give inat the last minute.

It trenchantly opposed a study mandated by the Trade-Related Investment Measures agreement of the WTO in the belief that it would be supported by other developing countries.

When push came to shove, countries such as Malaysia did a turnaround, striking their own deals with the Big Four of trade -- the European Union, the US, Japan and Canada -- and agreeing to the study.

Now, even as the the MAI has collapsed under its own weight in the OECD, several developed countries are anxious to revive these talks in the WTO.

America has been opposed to MAI talks in the WTO because it wanted a strong agreement which would have been harder to get in the 130-member WTO than in the 29-member rich-country club that is the OECD.

Now, however, with the failure of these three-year talks in the OECD, the rich-world claims to have learned several ``lessons'' from its failure.

The European Union's argument that the best must not be the enemy of the good seems to have been vindicated. The OECD MAIproved too vast and too radical for even rich countries to stomach. The EU hopes that investment talks in a broader-based WTO could yield an agreement which forces less investment liberalisation but has greater political acceptability and can be followed by incremental liberalisation.