The weaknesses and dangers of the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement are analysed in a set of research papers now available at bit.ly/TPPApapers.

This columnist contributed sections on TPPA's likely influence on value chains and 21st century trade agreements. The conclusions for New Zealand are ominous.

Rod Oram has the

TPPA will likely reinforce our position as a commodity producer and hinder our progress up the value chain where greater economic prosperity lies.

For example, large-scale overseas companies with close connections to their consumers will find it easier to tap into our resources than our small companies will find it to develop relationships with overseas consumers.

Similarly, restrictions on labelling through the TPPA's sanitary and phytosanitary measures may restrict opportunities for our food exporters to build a high quality, differentiated market position.

The TPPA will also protect the US and other heavy users of agricultural subsidies. This will hinder WTO efforts to reduce them.

Overall, TPPA reads very much like a charter for incumbent businesses, dominated by US ones, which are attempting to hold back the tides of economic change the world needs.

Yet even by our government's analysis, the benefits of the agreement are minimal for New Zealand. By 2030, our GDP would only be 0.9 per cent higher.

Extrapolating from current growth rates, GDP would increase by 47 per cent without TPPA and by 47.9 per cent with it.

TPPA's limited scope is one reason for its meagre benefit. Only three of our top five export markets are covered by it – Australia, the US and Japan, which account for 25 per cent of our exports.

China and the EU and the two missing markets, accounting for 30 per cent of our exports. Yet, China and the EU combined massively out-weigh TPPA countries in terms of GDP and population; and they have some quite different economic and political agendas.

China is attempting the greatest economic transformation in its history. This is the leap from the second wave of industrialisation to the fourth, from heavy manufacturing to high technology.

It needs its neighbours to help it achieve this unprecedented feat. The more sophisticated the Chinese economy becomes, the higher its labour and other costs. Thus China is increasingly tying its less developed, lower cost neighbours into its supply chains.

Detailed analysis of this is included in Standard Chartered Bank's study of the impact on global supply chains of the next wave of trade agreements, available at bit.ly/ChinaChains.

Moreover, China's economic transformation relies on its ability to develop, commercialise and defend intellectual property. That in turn is vital to China's ambitions to develop high value services as a growth engine of the economy as manufacturing's contribution becomes relatively less prominent.

But the TPPA's rules on IP and trade in services are very US-centric. As a result, US companies will be the greatest beneficiaries, according to analysis from diverse experts internationally.

Thus, China is negotiating its rival Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership whose 16 countries account for 49 per cent of people and 29 per cent of GDP in the world.

The biggest disagreement between the EU and the US-dominated TPPA is on Investor State Dispute Settlement practices. EU companies accounted for more than half the 568 ISDS cases filed in 98 countries up to 2013.

Yet, the arbitrary, non-transparent, corporate-favoured and public policy chilling nature of the system has made ISDS "a very toxic issue," Cecilia Malmström, the EU's Trade Commissioner, has said.

So, in its bilateral Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership negotiations with the US, the EU is proposing the arbitration system becomes more like conventional courts.

The environment is another "significant casualty" under the TPPA, concludes Simon Terry, executive director of the Sustainability Council, in one of the papers in the series. The environment chapter makes no mention of climate change and has ignored the urgent need to integrate economic and environmental management.

Yet, our government is determined to ignore the failings of the TPPA and sign up in haste.

So, our only hope is that the EU through its TTIP and China through its RCEP will force significant changes on the TPPA. Those would make it a true 21st century trade agreement, one far more beneficial to New Zealand.