For the past 62 years, the Union of International Associations has undertaken, for the benefit of its members, statistical studies on the preceding year’s international meetings. As in previous years, the report is also available for sale to the public following a period of three months’ exclusive use by UIA Associate Members. The full report will be available from September 15th 2011.
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 for the current reporting year (2010) is expected to be around 80 percent of that extracted from the database five years hence.
Since the 2008 edition of this report (published in 2009), the UIA meetings database has been enriched by connecting it more closely to its sister database on international organizations, the source of the Yearbook of International Organizations. This enhances the data available across the time scale and in particular enables historical surveys of international organization meeting activity as far back as 1850. It has also affected the rate of change in data.
It should be noted that UIA criteria for collection and inclusion have not changed; only the presentation has changed.
How many…
In report for 2010(published 2011)
- Total number of meetings in the UIA database-359,673
- Number of those answering the criteria for inclusion in this report-316,534
- Number of those taking place prior to the reporting year-297,724
- Number of those taking place in the reporting year-12,015
- Number of those scheduled to take place after the reporting year-6,795
- Number of countries represented for all years-256
- Number of cities represented for all years-11,047
- Number of countries represented for the reporting year only-181
- Number of cities represented for the reporting year only-1,573
General Picture: No continental divisions are presented in this edition. The editors welcome comments on theusefulness of the continental divisions used previously and suggestions as to possibly more useful divisions and groupings of countries.
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/uiapubs/vol5.htm). For more information on UIA Associate Membership, statistical and other information products, please
contact us (http://www.uia.org/contact/).
