66,000 organizations. For the past 65 years, the Union of International Associations (UIA) has undertaken 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 2014.
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. In the Yearbook of International Organizations Online (YIOO) the UIA provides a comprehensive database of over 66,000 organizations worldwide.
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 40 percent over the following five years.
