Seeking to form a European Union-styled community, Southeast Asian trade ministers are holding a summit this week in order to boost linkages and advance talks with some of their biggest economic partners, Bloomberg News reports.

Officials from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations will hold discussions with their counterparts from Japan, China, South Korea, India, Australia and New Zealand in Singapore starting tomorrow. They met with business leaders today.

Southeast Asian nations last year agreed to open up their markets further in a bid to create an economic zone modeled after the EU, without a common currency, by 2015. The group has said that it needs to improve its competitiveness as China and India, the world's two fastest-growing major economies, attract an increasing chunk of global investment.

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