What determines the holding of association meetings in a global context?

ABSTRACT

This article aims to understand the determinants influencing the number of association meetings held in countries worldwide and which may be controlled by their economic agents and policymakers. For this purpose, we use a dynamic panel model with data provided by the Data World Bank, the World Travel & Tourism Council, and the International Congress and Convention Association, in a time series of 8 years. The results reveal the importance of the experiences obtained by the tourists in previous meetings, as well as the countries’ need to implement measures to stimulate the dynamism of economic activity and political stability.

KEYWORDS:

• Association meetings
• business tourism
• meeting tourism
• convention tourism
• tourism marketing
• Asia Pacific
• MICE
• international tourism
• panel data
• ICCA

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Available at http://www.wttc.org/datagateway/.

2. Available at https://www.iccaworld.org/.

3. Several authors consider that there is a high approximation between the basket purchase acquired by international tourists and the basket purchase acquired by families (Crouch, 1992; Kulendran & Witt, 2003).

4. Available at http://data.worldbank.org/indicator.

5. The government effectiveness variable captures perceptions of the quality of public services, the quality of the civil service and the degree of its independence from political pressures, the quality of policy formulation and implementation, and the credibility of the government’s commitment to such policies (cf. Kaufmann et al., 2010).

6. Accessibility associated with transport infrastructures and public transport services.

7. Available at https://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi/#home.

8. Some models refer the importance of distance between the meeting and the major participants emitting countries as a relevant factor in selecting a host country of an event (Cró & Martins, 2018). Nevertheless, the distance was not introduced in our study because the macro-level perspective (that is, an aggregate approach) prevents the consideration of the distance as a potential determinant.

9. According to World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC, 2019), the capital investment account allows measuring the investment made by all sectors of the economic activity in the tourism industry, namely investment in accommodation, transport equipment and cultural, sports and entertainment equipment.

10. Available at http://www.wttc.org/datagateway/.

11. http://www.iccaworld.com.