A survey of over 300 international firms showed restrictions on a spouse's right to work is now the No1 reason for employees to refuse an overseas posting, Permits Foundation founder Katheleen van der Wilk-Carlton said.

Only Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand and Sweden give spouses of expatriate workers the automatic right to seek employment. Since 2002, the United States grants work permits to spouses of certain categories of people, notably managers or executives of multinational firms.

Quoting another study, van der Wilk-Carlton said more than 50 percent of expatriate spouses had worked before moving, but 85 percent of them gave up their jobs to follow their husband or wife abroad.

``The question of dual careers has moved from the family dinner table to the boardroom table and become a corporate issue,'' she told a conference hosted by British Telecom, one of 31 companies that sponsor the foundation she set up in 2001.

``There are signs that governments are beginning to respond'' to lobbying, she said, but many are still attracted by the idea of reciprocal agreements ``which are fine for the diplomatic service but not appropriate for the corporate world.''

Van der Wilk-Carlton said the campaign would focus on ``Malaysia and Singapore, which see themselves as trend-setters,'' as a first step towards lifting restrictions in Asia.

Permits Foundation, which is based in The Hague, intends to use the publication of policy proposals on managed migration by the European Commission on January 11 to campaign for the European Union to extend the rights of expatriate spouses to countries outside the 25-member EU.

Andrew Gould, chief executive of US-French oil services group Schlumberger, said, however, the real challenge is to convince China and India that it is in their interest to encourage greater mobility of international staff.

China trains about 300,000 engineers a year, five times as many as the United States, and 250,000 qualify in India.