If the global business events industry were a national economy, its $1.8 trillion total GDP would rank it 16th in the world. That figure comes from the Events Industry Council's 2026 Global Economic Significance of Business Events Study. The council released the full report on 4 August 2026, and the same headline figure appeared in its executive summary in May.
The figure anchors a column by Sherrif Karamat, president and chief executive officer of PCMA and CEMA, published on 8 October 2026. He reports that the industry's $1.3 trillion in direct sales runs higher than the direct sales of air transport, telecommunications equipment and textiles.
Karamat opens the column with the industry's record as a storyteller. Business events professionals, he writes, are expert at telling the story of the global economic impact of their work.
Measuring the Size of the Industry
Meeting professionals keep their own score through the size of the industry and the output of individual events. Karamat names the familiar units: room nights booked, jobs created, and spending that reaches local businesses and supply chains.
Those numbers carry weight, he writes. They show the industry's power and the economic benefits it brings to individuals, companies and destinations. They also measure activity. His point is that a count of how much happened describes volume, and that a second measure is needed for what the volume changed.
The Events Industry Council compiled the study with Oxford Economics. Karamat's column reports its headline figures and its respondent survey.
Evidence From Outside the Industry
Karamat points to research published outside the events field. In a 2025 article in the Project Management Journal, Harald Bathelt and Jörg Sydow argue that treating conferences and exhibitions as temporary gatherings misses their longer-lasting effects.
Convening in person is how professional communities and industries are built, they write. It is where new initiatives are discussed and financed. Without those meetings, they add, many projects would never materialise.
Bathelt is a professor of economic geography at the University of Toronto and Sydow is a management professor. They state that face-to-face contact is essential. Business events bring together the key actors and communities of a field, and the authors expect those gatherings to keep global relevance as places for knowledge exchange in a digital world.
The EIC study found broad agreement among events professionals on that point. Asked which results of business events are hardest to replace, seven in 10 named building relationships through face-to-face interaction. A further 12% named community, trust and emotional engagement.
PCMA Insights and the 2026 Outlook
Karamat writes that the industry needs to tell better stories about the outcomes of its events and about the human-centered value those events create. He ties that work to PCMA Insights, the business intelligence initiative PCMA launched in April 2026.
The initiative spans the PCMA 2026 Outlook report and four sector reports produced with MCI. Karamat writes that they map the size of key business events markets and name the human skills and behaviors that help meeting professionals design events which create change for business communities and for individual careers.
PCMA published the column on 8 October 2026.
The Instruction for Event Strategists
Karamat closes with an instruction for business event strategists. Identify the challenges your community most needs to solve. Name the changes that will benefit participants collectively and as individuals. Then measure those results alongside the economic impact.
The $1.8 trillion figure and the 16th-place ranking describe the scale of the industry. Karamat's column asks its readers to record the change an event leaves behind.