Cha-am, Thailand  - Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama on Saturday announced plans to host a summit next month of the five South-East Asian countries on the Mekong River to find ways to eliminate the development gaps among them.

"The major purpose of having this summit is to discuss best how the Mekong countries and Japan can work together to reduce or eliminate the current disparity between the ASEAN countries," said Kazuo Kodama, spokesman for Japan's Foreign Affairs Ministry.

The countries invited to the summit - Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam - are all members of ASEAN, or the Association of South-East Asian Nations.

ASEAN suffers from great disparity in the level of economic development of its 10 members, which includes poorly developed countries such as Laos and highly developed economies such as Singapore.

Japan, a top aid donor in the region, proposed the Mekong summit for November 6-7 in Tokyo at a weekend ASEAN-Japan summit at Thailand's Cha-am beach resort, 130 kilometres south-west of Bangkok.

Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva agreed to attend the Mekong summit, Kodama said.

Hatoyama also used the ASEAN summit to moot the establishment of an East Asian Community, although concrete plans for the new entity in a region already packed with groups and annual summits were not immediately clear.

"This is a long-term vision," Kodama said. (dpa)