“Trillion?”

“Apparently.”

“Are you sure it’s not billion?”

“Trillion. One point three trillion dollars.”

“A trillion is a thousand billion!”

“Yes. Erm. They calculate …”

“Hang on, hang on. That’s almost as big as the global power sector, the thing that gives us light when it’s dark and heat when it’s cold. How can conferences and exhibitions be anywhere near that?”

My friend is one of the cleverest people I know. He doesn’t look for work. He chooses it from whichever global behemoth or heavily backed start-up is headhunting him at the time.

He is affable and very funny. He does not suffer fools.

He also has an extremely tasteful house and a wine cellar to match, and because I am deep into a bottle of Pinot Noir – who knew this fragile grape could taste so luxuriant? - I decide to change the subject. I’m jet-lagged and can’t talk numbers right now. Not big numbers, anyway.

And, in case you missed it, the business events industry has produced another big number, so big you are forced to impersonate Dr Evil when dropping it into conversation: One point three triiiillion dollars (US$1.3 trillion).

That’s the amount the Events Industry Council (EIC) and researchers at Oxford Economics say business events generated in direct spending worldwide in 2025. The figure has been widely promoted as evidence that business events should be regarded as one of the world's major industries, alongside aerospace, telecommunications, and air transport.

But, to quote my friend, hang on …

When policymakers hear that business events are a US$1.3tn industry, most will assume that business events directly produce US$1.3tn of economic output. They do not.

What the study measures is a vast web of spending that happens when people meet.

The figure consists of practically all expenditure that could be associated with business events - including air travel, accommodation, food and beverage, local transport hire, venue hire, logistics, etc, etc.,. These are all real expenditures. However, they are overwhelmingly generated by industries that exist independently of business events.

When a delegate flies to a conference, the revenue belongs to the airline sector. When they stay in a hotel, the revenue belongs to hospitality, ditto when they eat in a restaurant. A business event may have stimulated the transaction, but it didn’t produce the value being counted.

This distinction matters because industries are normally defined by what they produce, not by the spending they influence. So, the automotive industry produces cars, telecommunications produce smartphones, aerospace produces aircraft. These industries derive their revenues from the goods and services they produce. The $1.3tn attributed to business events is cobbled together from expenditure dispersed across a wide ecosystem of suppliers. Comparing the two may be rhetorically attractive, but it conflates fundamentally different economic concepts.

Anyway, who, exactly, are we trying to kid?

Most politicians and civil servants have seen economic impact studies before. They know how multipliers work; how indirect and induced impacts are calculated. They know that if every sector claims credit for all the activity it influences, the resulting figures become absurdly large; a meaningless abstraction. 900bn this year. 1.5tn the next? A gazillion in 2050?? So what? What is anyone supposed to do with these numbers?

We know the business events industry is still treated as discretionary spending by governments. Just ask the convention bureau teams at VisitBrussels or VisitBritain. The industry’s response is to produce ever larger economic impact figures in the hope they will, finally, command attention.

The strategy is not working.

The industry's most compelling arguments have never been about room nights or restaurant receipts. They are about outcomes: a medical congress that spreads life-saving knowledge or a trade show that opens export markets. These are the things business events produce, even if they are harder to stick next to an extremely large number that might look good in a headline.

The study appears to confuse, or conflate, economic activity with economic impact. Gross spending tells us nothing about the value of business events, economic or otherwise. It’s just an accounting exercise. A totting up, if you will, of cash sloshing through the economy. The salient question is not whether business events are associated with $1.3tn in spending. It is how much additional productivity, innovation, trade, knowledge transfer and, yes, spending, would disappear if those events did not occur.

Without modelling a counter-factual, the numbers in the EIC report are just that: numbers.

There are other problems with the report.

The definition of what constitutes a business event - ‘a gathering of ten or more people, lasting at least four hours in a contracted venue’ - is generous in the extreme. That captures everything from conferences and exhibitions - what most people would understand by the business events industry - to team away-days and internal sales meetings (i.e. 1 x table, 10 x chairs, and 1 x plate of digestive biscuits). Once a category becomes broad enough to encompass routine activities occurring across almost every sector of the economy, very, very large numbers are inevitable.

But, again, who are we trying to kid?

Of the hundreds of industry events I’ve attended over the years, none has had anything to say about an office supplies firm in Stoke having a brainstorming session in the local Toby Carvery.

Elsewhere the study reports 1.65bn participants globally. That number sounds impressive until you realise that ‘participants’ are not necessarily unique individuals. In a year, I might attend a dozen or more conferences, trade shows, or expos. Does the 1.65bn figure exaggerate the scale of engagement? Even if the effect is unintentional, I suspect it probably does. But then if you include every IT Steve summoned to a spot of DEI training … probably not.

The EIC report contains a much stronger case for the value of business events than the trillion-dollar headline suggests. Its discussion of knowledge transfer, innovation, professional development, scientific collaboration and relationship-building points towards the unique contribution that face-to-face engagement can make. Those benefits, although harder to quantify, are far more important – and pertinent to this unique industry - than the hotel nights, airline tickets and restaurant bills that dominate the economic impact calculations.

If the sector wants to strengthen its advocacy – and under the circumstances that really should be a given - then it must be more precise about what it is claiming. Business events undoubtedly generate substantial demand for travel, hospitality and a wide range of supporting services. They create economic activity and support jobs. Yet their value lies less in the spending they absorb than in the knowledge, innovation and commercial relationships they help to create.

The industry's strongest argument is not that it is a discreet US$1.3tn ‘industry’.

It is that it serves as an essential platform through which other industries create value. That may be a less dramatic claim, but it is, ultimately, a far more persuasive one. Someone once described the business events industry to me as ‘a meta-sector’ – something that cuts across industries and helps them grow and prosper. It’s not that difficult a concept. We should have more faith in politicians and policymakers to grasp it - and stop with the humungous numbers.