Research Is Ammunition, Not Documentation
technique — attributed to Amy Calvert
The EIC's 2026 Global Economic Significance study, produced with Oxford Economics, was designed to arm practitioners in conversations with policymakers and budget-holders. The target is the indifferent CFO or the skeptical congressman who has not been made to understand what the events industry generates. Each number in the study -- $1.8 trillion in total GDP, 24.2 million jobs, sixteenth-largest economy on earth -- is a pre-built argument that every CMP can deploy in those conversations without constructing it from scratch. Calvert describes this as the organization's role: not to produce knowledge for its own sake, but to equip its members with the specific instruments they need in the specific rooms where the industry's case has to be made.
Calvert's account of commissioning the 2026 Oxford Economics study and its advocacy function as the most consequential economic argument in EIC's 75-year history.
advocacy, economic-research, policy, data