Recent years have witnessed other significant changes. For example, cash is used less and less while good manners seem to have increasingly characterized past behavior. Spending of individuals and families seem to come more and more in fixed amounts. The law of demand seems to play less of a role, while the overall budget has become more important. This means that tightening the belt can play less of a role when economic conditions worsen during recessions and inflations. The value of economic exchange now depends much more on the information contained in the exchange than on the value of the labor and material of what is exchanged. This may have implications for the welfare as distinguished from the economic value of the exchange. More recently the scarcity of rare materials and of difficult to produce inputs (such as micro transistors) may have become more important.

The communitarian theory of WTO law outlined in previous chapters works reasonably well as a description of key features of WTO law. Its “fit” with the existing law raises the possibility of the theory serving wider applications. That possibility is likely to be canvassed most insistently in relation to international investment law, the body of law pertaining to the protection and treatment of foreign investment by host states. A communitarian theory would forecast international investment law to be preoccupied with corrective justice and to be heavily contractual, retrospective and inductive. The chapter demonstrates how all of these features are confirmed in the shape of contemporary international investment law, and how in light of considerable dissatisfaction with the current investment regime, an impulse is detected toward something more egalitarian, and therefore more obligatory, constitutive, prospective and presumptive.