When the People's Republic of China (PRC) was granted Most Favored Nation (MFN) status by the United States in 1979, no one imagined the massive transformation the Chinese economy would make within a few decades. China's remarkable transition from merely being a “world factory”, to the source of the world's new R&D and product design and innovation since the 1980s is the key focus of Spillover Effects of China Going Global. In this insightful and unique book, Joseph Pelzman shows how the second largest world economy triggered off many spillover effects beyond mass-labour production of durable and non-durable goods — such as the provision of foreign aid to African, Latin American and Asian economies, and increasing focus on internal endogenous innovation, research and development. He provides a comprehensive look at these spillover effects and analyzes how they will undoubtedly bring positive opportunities for others within the rest of the world in the 21st Century.

The publication contains an explanation of Most Favored Nation (MFN) treatment and some of the key issues that arise in its negotiation, particularly the scope and application of MFN treatment to the liberalization and protection of foreign investors in recent treaty practice. The paper provides policy options as regards the traditional application of MFN treatment and identifies reactions by States to the unexpected broad use of MFN treatment, and provides several drafting options, such as specifying or narrowing down the scope of application of MFN treatment to certain types of activities, clarifying the nature of "treatment" under the IIA, clarifying the comparison that an arbitral tribunal needs to undertake as well as a qualification of the comparison "in like circumstances" or excluding its use in investor-State cases.