The large question we want to reconnoitre here is how to situate the purpose behind enhancing the trade regime, and trade in services in particular, within the range of other goals pursued by the international community. We ask this question at a time when the trade regime itself is experiencing an identity crisis, lacking in commitment to its institutional development and lacking a sufficiently compelling account of the purpose it is seeking to achieve. The question concerning its purpose nags away at the trade regime especially when it is being called to account for how it contributes to (or impedes) the advancement of the world's poorest countries, how it can be reconciled with the Marrakesh Agreement commitment to the objective of sustainable development, and how it relates to other overarching goals of international law. It is as if the trade regime is to the architecture of international law what a nondescript office tower is to architecture itself: it performs a purely economic function but is otherwise uninspiring and out of reach to the mass of people it looms over. Indeed, if trade law performs a purely economic function, the idea of moving the world toward further, ongoing economic integration, captured in the notion of progressive liberalisation, itself seems to have lost steam as doubts about the benefits of liberalised trade spread even to its erstwhile champions.

An example of this can be found in the recent debate between Paul Samuelson and his own students about the economic benefits of trade.