UIA releases 62nd International Meetings Statistics Report to its members

The Union of International Associations (UIA) has released its 62nd International Meetings Statistics Report to its members but is restricting any headline detail to one general graph for public consumption, at least until September 2021. The association claims the report will provide two views of a sector now facing multiple challenges due to the coronavirus pandemic: data for meetings in the year 2019 are presented in full, the last ‘good year’ before the crisis, in addition to an analysis of what took place in 2020. The data in the report are drawn, the UIA says, from its database, the source of the International Congress Calendar and the Yearbook of International Organizations. Covering international association meetings held around the world in 2019 and 2020, the report is supposed to provide comprehensive data for the-year-that-was and also a 20-year perspective on trends from 2001 through 2020. Some 900 meetings have been added to the data for 2019 since the last report was published, the UIA says, while the number of meetings currently profiled for 2020 is drastically reduced from the trend of 12,000 to 15,000 per year due to the impact of the pandemic on association life, travel, and public gatherings.