"We plan with our East Asia dialogue partners to launch (the fund) as soon as possible," said Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah of Brunei, one of the 13 nations planning to take part in the fund.

Earlier in the day, Chinese and Japanese leaders reached consensus on the plan with their counterparts from South Korea and the 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

"(They) agreed on the need to strengthen regional cooperation and policy coordination in the face of the global financial crisis," the spokesman for South Korean President Lee Myung-Bak said.

"The East Asian leaders agreed to accelerate multilateral cooperation to create an 80-billion-dollar fund by the end of next year's first half and establish an independent regional financial market surveillance organisation."

However no other party involved immediately gave a firm timeline for when the fund would definitely be created, with officials pointing to further meetings between the "ASEAN Plus Three" nations.

A working group will prepare concrete proposals ahead of an ASEAN summit in Thailand in December, the regional group said in a statement.

The fund will be available to countries whose currency suddenly has come under pressure, as has happened recently to Vietnam, observers said.

But ASEAN secretary general Surin Pitsuwan told Dow Jones Newswires it was a "fair assumption" that the fund's scope might be widened to also include domestic liquidity crunches.

"The sense is that it'll be more than just to save a currency under pressure," he said.

Ten years ago, when the Asian financial crisis swept across the region, countries in the area set up a similar mechanism, referred to as the Chiang Mai Initiative.

"Reviving this idea right now is mainly because the environment is not good. They're trying to create confidence. It's a signal," said Andy Xie, an independent economist based in Shanghai.

The East Asian countries began talks in 2006 on transforming the Chiang Mai Initiative into a more powerful and multilateral reserve pooling mechanism.

In May they reached preliminary agreement to create a foreign exchange reserve pool of 80 billion dollars.

The initial agreement called for South Korea, Japan and China to provide 80 percent or 64 billion dollars, with ASEAN members providing the remaining 16 billion.

However disagreements continued between South Korea, China and Japan on cost-sharing and the way the fund would be managed, South Korea's Yonhap news agency quoted a top aide to President Lee as saying.

Other reports have said that China wanted its influence, as the holder of the world's largest forex reserves of 1.8 trillion dollars, to be reflected in the management of the fund.

"However, the three countries have now ironed out their differences in Beijing, paving the way for an early creation of the new Asian monetary fund," said the unidentified aide, according to Yonhap.

Xie, the Shanghai-based economist, expressed doubt that the fund would materialise if markets were to improve in the coming months.

"When the market stabilises, and confidence is higher, I'm not sure they are ready to follow through," he said.

"The devil is in the details. The negotiations are going to drag on. Usually in Asia something like this dies a slow death."