The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), Asia’s largest trade bloc, will seek out ways to enhance intra-regional trade, and may even consider admitting new members, when its leaders meet next month, according to a senior Malaysian official. Malaysia, the current chair of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), previously announced that it plans to convene an RCEP summit during next month’s 47th ASEAN Summit and its clutch of related meetings. In an interview ahead of a meeting with ASEAN economic ministers this week, Malaysia’s Trade Minister Tengku Zafrul Aziz told Reuters that the meeting would “let members suggest improvements to the RCEP trade deal and consider requests from some countries to join,” the news agency reported. In general, its terms are less stringent than many trade pacts, including the 11-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal that President Donald Trump pulled out at the start of his first term in 2017. This gives much of the region a strong incentive to strengthen intra-regional economic and trade ties, both within the existing multilateral trade blocs like RCEP and the CPTPP and on a bilateral basis.