A US-Japan summit last month had shaken the two countries free of a stalemate over access to Japan's farm and auto markets in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), but more work was needed before a broad agreement could be reached, the official said. The deadlock between Japan and the United States, the biggest economies in the 12-nation TPP, has held up progress on the wider trade agreement in recent months as other countries awaited the outcome of the negotiations. TPP negotiators, from countries including Canada, Australia, Mexico and Malaysia, are in Vietnam this week for another round of negotiations, and ministers will meet on May 19-20 in Singapore. The senior US official, who asked not to be named, said the next stage of TPP negotiations involved other countries also sitting down to work out market access issues with Japan. Once it was clear what each country could get from the deal in terms of exports, it would be time to knuckle down on setting common rules on issues such as labour, the environment and intellectual property, he said at a briefing for journalists. The US official also urged China to show leadership on an agreement to eliminate duties on billions of dollars of technology products, which will be under discussion at a meeting of Asia-Pacific trade ministers in China this weekend. The United States, China, the European Union and nearly two dozen other countries are negotiating an expansion of the World Trade Organization's Information Technology Agreement, a 16-year-old pact that eliminated duties on a long list of products including personal computers, laptops and telephones. The United States and Europe have blamed China, the world's biggest exporter of IT products, for derailing the technology talks by asking for too many exemptions from the deal. ­— Reuters