Members of a Pacific Rim trade initiative rejected by U.S. President Donald Trump are to hold working-level talks [on July 12] in the Japanese mountain resort town of Hakone, west of Tokyo.

The three-day meeting among envoys from the 11 remaining members of the Trans-Pacific Partnership follows a breakthrough last week on a Japan-European Union trade deal seen as a repudiation of the U.S. moves to pull back from such arrangements.

Last week, Japan named a new chief negotiator for TPP talks, Kazuyoshi Umemoto, a former ambassador to Italy...

Other TPP members hope to make progress on an alternative that does not include the U.S. before an Asia-Pacific summit in Vietnam in November.

...Th[e] deal has to be restructured since as originally agreed it can only take effect after it is ratified by six countries that account for 85 per cent of its original members' combined gross domestic product. The U.S. made up 60 per cent of the TPP's combined GDP, so it could not be implemented as it stands now.

Japanese officials say they are hoping the TPP talks will get a boost from the Economic Partnership Agreement reached with the EU, which dismantles trade barriers and eases tariffs on a wide range of products for the two markets accounting for almost a third of world economic activity.

The other TPP member countries are Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam...

This is excerpted from 11 July 2017 edition of CTV News.