For the past six decades, the Union of International Associations (UIA) has undertaken statistical studies on the preceding years’ international meetings. The complete report is available for sale to the public following a period of three months’ exclusive use by UIA Associate Members; it will be available to non-members from September 1st 2015.
The statistics are based on information systematically collected by the UIA Congress Department and selected according to strict criteria maintained over the years, thus enabling meaningful comparison from year to year.
Meetings taken into consideration include those organized and/or sponsored by the international organizations which appear in the Yearbook of International Organizations and in the International Congress Calendar, i.e. the sittings of their principal organs, congresses, conventions, symposia, regional sessions grouping several countries, as well as some national meetings with international participation organized by national branches of international associations.
Not included are purely national meetings as well as those of an exclusively religious, didactic, political, commercial, or sporting nature, and corporate and incentive meetings, the survey of these specific markets not being within the scope of activities of the UIA.
More prominence is also given to presenting data which, due to the passage of time, can be considered to have stabilized. The editors emphasize that the number of meetings in the database for the current reporting year will, on average, increase by 11 percent over the next year, and by nearly 35 percent over the following five years.
It should be noted that UIA criteria for collection and inclusion have not changed over time; only the presentation has changed.
Total number of meetings in the UIA database 458,453 428,369
Number of those answering the criteria for inclusion in this report 412,403 384,097
Number of those taking place prior to the reporting year 393,667 364,834
Number of those taking place in the reporting year 12,350 12,212
Number of those scheduled to take place after the reporting year 6,386 7,051
Number of countries represented for all years 248 252
Number of cities represented for all years 12,683 11,959
Number of countries represented for the reporting year only 178 181
Number of cities represented for the reporting year only 1,449 1,493
Top international meeting countries in 2015 (extracted from Table 1.2, A+B column)
Country, Number of meetings, Percentage of all meetings
1. USA 930 7.8%
2. Korea Rep 891 7.5%
3. Belgium 737 6.2%
4. Singapore 736 6.2%
5. Japan 634 5.3%
6. France 590 5.0%
7. Spain 480 4.0%
8. Germany 472 4.0%
9. Italy 385 3.2%
10. Austria 383 3.2%
Top international meeting cities in 2015 (extracted from Table 1.3, A+B column)
City Number of meetings Percentage of all meetings
1. Singapore 736 6.3%
2. Brussels 665 5.7%
3. Seoul 494 4.2%
4. Paris 362 3.1%
5. Vienna 308 2.1%
6. Tokyo 249 2.1%
7. Bangkok 242 1.8%
8. Berlin 215 1.6%
9. Barcelona 187 1.4%
10. Geneva 172 1.4%
The Table of Contents of the complete statistics report and the criteria descriptions are given on the following pages.
Associated and complementary information is available in the Yearbook of International Organizations: Volume 5 (Statistics, Visualizations and Patterns) which contains extensive statistical information on international meetings and organizations (see http://www.uia.org/yearbook).
