For the past 64 years, the Union of International Associations (UIA) has undertaken, for the benefit of its members, statistical studies on the preceding year’s international meetings. The complete 80 page report is also 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 2013.
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 25 percent over the following three years, and by 40 percent over the following five years.
As of the report for 2008 (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 enriches the data available across the time scale and in particular enables historical surveys of international organization meeting activity as far back as the 1850s. It has also affected the rate of change in data, giving an exceptional boost to the numbers presented as of the report for 2008 (published in 2009); these numbers have, in the intervening years, been further corrected and stabilized.
It should be noted that UIA criteria for collection and inclusion have not changed over time; only the presentation has changed.
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).
For more information on UIA Associate Membership, statistical and other information products, please contact us
(http://www.uia.org/contact-uia).
