Deputy Secretary-General of ASEAN Pushpanathan Sundram said it appears that an agreement will be reached to create a wide-area trade bloc encompassing South Korea, China, Japan, Australia and New Zealand through 2014.

Bloomberg News and other news agencies reported Pushpanathan as saying in an interview that the ASEAN will create one of the world’s biggest economic spaces to do business, which will be just like operating a free flow of trade and investments in one single region.

The ASEAN deputy secretary-general also said that the ASEAN would seek ways to strengthen trade deals with other Asian nations to provide a buffer against the negative effects of an economic crisis in the U.S.