Daniel Davies's explanation of Cancun is so interesting I'm going to link to it again now that it's on D-squared digest :

What does ["Singapore issues"] mean?

Effectively, that it would become illegal under the WTO not only to place tariffs on trade in goods and services, but also to place any restrictions on investment by overseas corporations, or to have any laws in place which had the effect of disadvantaging foreign companies compared to domestic ones.

Aren’t these natural things for the WTO to be discussing?

Absolutely not. The WTO is the World Trade Organisation, which was set up in order to facilitate trade in goods and services, something which more or less everyone agrees to be a general good. Free mobility of capital and investment is a much more controversial topic, mainly because the legal procedures needed to establish it would be much more invasive of national sovereignty, and because the benefits from liberalising capital flows are much less certain and significant than those from liberalising trade (for example, it’s not really consistent with the existence of nationalised industries, and it provides an easy channel for multinational companies to launch harrassing cases against any domestic legislation they don’t like; to take a hypothetical example, the local Coke bottling plant could launch an action against a free school milk program for unfairly prejudicing their investment1.).


D-squared Digest -- A fat young man without a good word for anyone