Seoul (VNA) - East Asian nations agreed on October 24 to create an 80 billion USD joint fund by next June to help avert regional financial crises.
Leaders of the 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the Republic of Korea (RoK), China and Japan reached the agreement at a meeting in Beijing, the spokesman for RoK President Lee Myung-Bak was quoted as saying.
The leaders agreed on the need to strengthen regional cooperation and policy coordination in the face of the global financial crisis, the spokesman said in a statement.
He added that they agreed to establish an independent regional financial market surveillance organisation.
The "ASEAN Plus Three" fund would supersede the Chiang Mai Initiative, established in 2000 in the wake of the 1997/98 East Asian financial crisis to ease mainly bilateral currency swaps.
The East Asian countries began talks in 2006, focusing on transforming the Chiang Mai Initiative into a more powerful and multilateral reserve pooling mechanism. In May they reached a preliminary agreement to create a foreign exchange reserve pool totaling 80 billion USD.
ASEAN consists of Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.-Enditem.