What is the format of the conference?

The conference is an academic forum for researchers and practitioners to present their work.

International Conference on Economics, Trade and Development (ICETD) 2027

Name: International Conference on Economics, Trade and Development (ICETD) 2027
Start: 2027-02-18 00:00:00+00:00
End: 2027-02-19 00:00:00+00:00
Location: Jeddah

Feb 18–19, 2027Jeddah, Saudi ArabiaIn-person

Registration open

The International Conference on Economics, Trade and Development (ICETD) is an academic forum held in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. It focuses on contemporary issues in economics, international trade, and development studies, providing a platform for researchers and practitioners to present their work and engage in discussions. The conference aims to foster interdisciplinary collaboration and advance understanding of global economic challenges and opportunities.

Committees & topics

Topics
Accounting: Global Standards, Disclosure, and Cross-Border Enforcement · Advertising Management in the Digital and Platform Economy · Business and Economics: Globalization, Industrial Policy, and Fragmentation · Business Ethics: Corporate Conduct, Human Rights, and ESG · Business Intelligence: Data, Analytics, and Cross-Border Governance · Business Information Systems: Digital Infrastructure and Cyber Resilience · Business Law: Cross-Border Commerce, Arbitration, and Regulatory Divergence · Business Performance Management: Metrics, Productivity, and Accountability

Why it matters

The ICETD is significant for several reasons. First, its focus on economics, trade, and development addresses critical global issues that impact nations worldwide. Discussions at the conference can shed light on effective strategies for economic growth, equitable trade practices, and sustainable development, which are vital for improving living standards and fostering stability. Second, the location in Jeddah, SAU, places the conference in a region undergoing significant economic transformation and playing an increasingly prominent role in global trade and investment. This geographical context offers a unique perspective on the challenges and opportunities in emerging markets and the broader global economy. Third, the interdisciplinary nature of the conference encourages a holistic approach to complex problems. By bringing together diverse perspectives from economics, trade, and development, the ICETD can facilitate the generation of innovative solutions that consider the multifaceted dimensions of global challenges.

How to prepare

To effectively engage with the themes of the ICETD, participants should consider a multi-faceted preparatory approach. A strong understanding of current global economic trends, particularly those impacting emerging markets and the Middle East, would be beneficial. Reviewing recent literature on international trade agreements, development economics, and regional economic integration will provide a solid foundation. Given the conference's focus, participants might also benefit from exploring the Model Diplomat lesson on "dynamic-analysis" to understand how various economic factors interact and influence policy outcomes. Additionally, familiarizing oneself with the economic policies and development goals of SAU could offer valuable context for discussions.

For those presenting or looking to contribute significantly to discussions, considering the "hidden-stakeholders" and "engagement-strategies" lessons could be particularly useful. Understanding the diverse interests and motivations of different actors in economic and trade discussions can enhance the impact of presented research and foster more productive dialogue. Preparing to articulate the practical implications of research findings for policymakers and international organizations will also be crucial. Finally, given the international nature of the conference, an awareness of different cultural perspectives on economic development and trade, possibly informed by the "gender-dynamics-across-cultures" lesson, can facilitate more nuanced and inclusive exchanges.

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 3 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Saudi Arabia

As the host nation, SAU is likely to emphasize its Vision 2030 economic diversification plan and its role in regional and global trade.

Role in topic

SAU, as the host country, is a major player in global energy markets and is actively pursuing economic diversification. Its perspective on trade and development will likely highlight initiatives to attract foreign investment, develop non-oil sectors, and enhance its position as a logistics hub. The conference provides a platform for SAU to showcase its progress and engage with international experts on its development trajectory.

China

CHN will likely focus on its Belt and Road Initiative and its growing trade relationships with countries in the Middle East and Africa.

Role in topic

CHN is a global economic powerhouse and a significant trading partner for many nations, including those in the Middle East. Its perspective will likely center on the expansion of its global trade networks, the implications of its Belt and Road Initiative for regional development, and its strategies for sustainable economic growth amidst global challenges. CHN's participation would offer insights into large-scale development and trade policies.

United States

The USA will likely advocate for open markets, fair trade practices, and the importance of innovation and private sector-led development.

Role in topic

The USA remains a dominant force in the global economy and a key proponent of international trade rules. Its perspective would likely emphasize the importance of free and fair trade, intellectual property rights, and the role of innovation in driving economic development. The USA might also highlight its development aid programs and partnerships aimed at fostering economic stability and growth in various regions.

Topics & background

The background behind each topic and the actors that shape it.

Accounting: Global Standards, Disclosure, and Cross-Border Enforcement

Modern accounting evolved from double-entry bookkeeping codified by Luca Pacioli in 15th-century Italy into a global infrastructure for measuring economic activity. The 20th century saw national standard-setters emerge — the U.S. Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) issuing Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (US GAAP), and the International Accounting Standards Committee (later the IASB, established in 2001) developing International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). Following the Enron and WorldCom scandals in 2001–2002, the U.S. enacted the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, while the 2008 global financial crisis exposed weaknesses in fair-value accounting, off-balance-sheet vehicles, and auditor independence, prompting reforms by the IASB, FASB, and the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB). The central dispute today is convergence versus regulatory sovereignty. Over 140 jurisdictions require or permit IFRS, but the United States retains US GAAP, and China and India use national standards substantially aligned with — but not identical to — IFRS. A second axis of contention is the expansion of accounting into sustainability and tax transparency: the IFRS Foundation launched the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) in 2021, while the EU's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and the OECD's Pillar Two global minimum tax (effective 2024 in many jurisdictions) are reshaping disclosure obligations. Cross-border audit oversight — particularly U.S.-China disputes over PCAOB inspection access, partially resolved by a 2022 agreement — remains fragile.

Key players

Advertising Management in the Digital and Platform Economy

Advertising management as a discipline matured in the early 20th century with the rise of mass-circulation press, radio, and television, and with agencies like J. Walter Thompson and Ogilvy professionalizing brand strategy, media buying, and creative planning. The arrival of search advertising (Google AdWords in 2000) and social media advertising in the 2000s shifted the industry's economic center from broadcast intermediaries to digital platforms, with programmatic auctions, real-time bidding, and algorithmic targeting becoming dominant by the 2010s. Global ad spending now exceeds USD 1 trillion annually, with digital channels accounting for roughly two-thirds of the total. The core contemporary disputes concern data, competition, and content. Privacy regimes — the EU's GDPR (2018), California's CCPA, and similar laws in Brazil, India, and China — restrict behavioral targeting, while Apple's App Tracking Transparency (2021) and the phase-out of third-party cookies have disrupted attribution. Antitrust authorities in the U.S., EU, and UK have brought cases against Google and Meta over ad-tech dominance. Parallel debates concern misleading advertising, influencer disclosure, greenwashing, advertising to children, and the role of generative AI in creative production and synthetic endorsements. Industry self-regulation through the International Chamber of Commerce code and national bodies coexists uneasily with expanding statutory oversight.

Key players

Business and Economics: Globalization, Industrial Policy, and Fragmentation

The post-1945 international economic order, built around the Bretton Woods institutions and the GATT/WTO trading system, produced an unprecedented expansion of global trade and investment. China's WTO accession in 2001, the deepening of European integration, and the spread of global value chains drove rapid convergence in some emerging economies while exposing advanced economies to industrial dislocation. The 2008 financial crisis, the 2016 political shifts in the U.S. and U.K., the COVID-19 pandemic, and Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine successively eroded confidence in unrestricted globalization and put supply-chain resilience, energy security, and technology dependence at the center of economic policy. The current debate pits a renewed industrial policy — exemplified by the U.S. CHIPS and Science Act (2022) and Inflation Reduction Act, the EU's Green Deal Industrial Plan, and China's 'Made in China 2025' and dual-circulation strategy — against the principles of open trade enshrined at the WTO, whose Appellate Body has been paralyzed since 2019. Inflation surges in 2021–2023, divergent monetary tightening, sovereign debt distress in lower-income countries, and the rise of 'friend-shoring' and export controls on semiconductors and critical minerals define the immediate policy landscape. Underlying these are longer-run questions: productivity slowdowns, demographic aging, climate transition costs, and the distributional consequences of automation and AI.

Key players

Business Ethics: Corporate Conduct, Human Rights, and ESG

Modern business ethics emerged as a distinct field in the 1970s amid scandals such as Lockheed's foreign bribery payments, which prompted the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977. The 1990s and 2000s broadened the agenda to labor conditions in global supply chains (Nike, Apple), accounting fraud (Enron, Parmalat), and financial misconduct culminating in the 2008 crisis. The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, endorsed in 2011, established a 'protect, respect, remedy' framework that has since shaped national action plans and binding due-diligence laws. Today the field is dominated by mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence: France's Duty of Vigilance Law (2017), Germany's Supply Chain Act (2023), and the EU's Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD, 2024) impose obligations across global value chains, while the U.S. Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (2022) bars imports linked to Xinjiang. ESG investing — once a fast-growing category — faces backlash in parts of the United States and scrutiny over greenwashing, even as the ISSB standardizes sustainability disclosure. Persistent disputes include the extraterritorial reach of due-diligence laws, the treatment of state-owned enterprises, anti-bribery enforcement gaps, AI ethics, and whistleblower protection.

Key players

Business Intelligence: Data, Analytics, and Cross-Border Governance

Business intelligence (BI) evolved from 1960s decision-support systems and 1990s data warehousing into today's cloud-based analytics stacks combining ETL pipelines, OLAP, visualization tools (Tableau, Power BI, Looker), and increasingly machine learning. The proliferation of enterprise data, the commoditization of cloud compute through AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, and the emergence of data-lakehouse architectures (Snowflake, Databricks) have made BI a strategic function across sectors. The integration of generative AI since 2023 has further blurred the boundary between traditional BI and predictive or prescriptive analytics. The principal policy disputes concern data localization, cross-border transfer, and competition. The EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework (2023) replaced earlier arrangements struck down by the Schrems I and II rulings; China's Data Security Law and Personal Information Protection Law (2021) require security reviews for outbound data; India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act (2023) and similar laws across the Global South add further fragmentation. Concentration in cloud infrastructure has drawn antitrust attention in the UK, EU, and U.S., while the use of BI in workforce surveillance, credit scoring, and algorithmic pricing has raised civil-liberties and consumer-protection questions that committee debates will need to weigh against efficiency and innovation gains.

Key players

Business Information Systems: Digital Infrastructure and Cyber Resilience

Business information systems (BIS) — the integration of enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), supply-chain management, and increasingly cloud and AI services — became the operational backbone of the global economy through waves of investment in SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, and Salesforce platforms from the 1990s onward. Cloud migration in the 2010s and the COVID-19 shock to remote work accelerated digital transformation, but also expanded the attack surface for cyber incidents. Major events — NotPetya (2017), SolarWinds (2020), Colonial Pipeline (2021), Log4j (2021), MOVEit (2023), and the CrowdStrike outage (2024) — have demonstrated the systemic risks of concentrated software and service dependencies. Governments have responded with stricter cybersecurity and resilience regimes: the EU's NIS2 Directive and Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) for finance, the U.S. SEC's cyber-incident disclosure rules (2023), China's Multi-Level Protection Scheme and Cybersecurity Law, and Japan's Economic Security Promotion Act. Disputes center on the regulation of critical and managed service providers, secure-by-design obligations on vendors, software bill of materials (SBOM) requirements, export controls on advanced semiconductors and AI systems, and the geopolitics of submarine cables and data centers. The committee will need to balance interoperability and innovation against national security and supply-chain integrity.

Key players

Business Law: Cross-Border Commerce, Arbitration, and Regulatory Divergence

Modern international business law rests on a layered architecture: the 1958 New York Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards, the 1980 UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG), the WTO agreements, and a dense network of bilateral investment treaties (BITs) and free trade agreements. Institutions such as UNCITRAL, UNIDROIT, the ICC International Court of Arbitration, ICSID, and the Hague Conference on Private International Law develop harmonized rules for contracts, secured transactions, insolvency, and dispute resolution. Investor-state arbitration grew rapidly after the 1990s but has faced legitimacy critiques, prompting UNCITRAL Working Group III reforms and the EU's push for a Multilateral Investment Court. Contemporary disputes concern regulatory divergence as much as harmonization. Sanctions regimes — particularly U.S., EU, and UK measures against Russia since 2022 — raise complex questions of extraterritoriality, secondary sanctions, and asset seizure. Competition law diverges sharply on digital markets (EU Digital Markets Act, U.S. enforcement actions, China's platform crackdown). Cross-border insolvency, climate-related corporate litigation, supply-chain due-diligence statutes, AI liability, and the enforceability of choice-of-court agreements under the 2005 and 2019 Hague Conventions all sit on the active agenda. Lower-income states increasingly contest BIT terms and pursue treaty terminations or renegotiations.

Key players

Business Performance Management: Metrics, Productivity, and Accountability

Business performance management (BPM) draws on a century of management thought — from Taylorist scientific management and DuPont's return-on-investment analysis in the early 20th century to Drucker's management by objectives, the Balanced Scorecard developed by Kaplan and Norton in 1992, Six Sigma, and the OKR framework popularized by Intel and Google. The discipline integrates financial planning, operational KPIs, risk management, and strategic execution, increasingly supported by integrated BI and AI tooling. Frameworks such as COSO ERM, ISO 31000, and the IFRS sustainability standards have expanded performance measurement to include non-financial dimensions. Current debates focus on what counts as performance and to whom firms are accountable. The shareholder-primacy model articulated by Milton Friedman has been challenged by stakeholder-capitalism statements (Business Roundtable, 2019), the rise of ESG-linked executive compensation, and mandatory sustainability reporting under ISSB and CSRD. Productivity stagnation in many advanced economies, persistent measurement gaps for intangibles and human capital, the integration of climate-transition risk into capital allocation, and questions of algorithmic management and worker surveillance are reshaping BPM practice. Regulators, investors, and standard-setters are pressing for comparable, audited non-financial metrics, while firms navigate political backlash against ESG and competing national disclosure regimes.

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for International Conference on Economics, Trade and Development (ICETD) 2027.

Recent reporting to ground your prep

House Ethics Committee Pushes Sexual Miscond.

Congressional Ethics Failures

Black Coffee's O2 Show: South African Music's

Haryana's Community Farm Tanks for Water

Lessons

Bite-sized lessons to build the basics

Dynamic Analysis

Hidden Stakeholders

Engagement Strategies

Stakeholder Mapping Workshop

Courses

Guided courses that go deeper on the topic

Crisis Management

Advanced Negotiation

Multilateral Negotiation

Policy Brief Writing

The states in play, with the data that shapes their stance

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Saudi Arabia February 2027

By committee

Frequently asked questions

International Conference on Economics, Trade and Development (ICETD) 2027

Feb 18–19, 2027Jeddah, Saudi ArabiaIn-person

Registration open

Committees & topics

Topics
Accounting: Global Standards, Disclosure, and Cross-Border Enforcement · Advertising Management in the Digital and Platform Economy · Business and Economics: Globalization, Industrial Policy, and Fragmentation · Business Ethics: Corporate Conduct, Human Rights, and ESG · Business Intelligence: Data, Analytics, and Cross-Border Governance · Business Information Systems: Digital Infrastructure and Cyber Resilience · Business Law: Cross-Border Commerce, Arbitration, and Regulatory Divergence · Business Performance Management: Metrics, Productivity, and Accountability

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 3 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Saudi Arabia

As the host nation, SAU is likely to emphasize its Vision 2030 economic diversification plan and its role in regional and global trade.

Role in topic

China

CHN will likely focus on its Belt and Road Initiative and its growing trade relationships with countries in the Middle East and Africa.

Role in topic

United States

The USA will likely advocate for open markets, fair trade practices, and the importance of innovation and private sector-led development.

Role in topic

Topics & background

The background behind each topic and the actors that shape it.

Accounting: Global Standards, Disclosure, and Cross-Border Enforcement

Key players

Advertising Management in the Digital and Platform Economy

Key players

Business and Economics: Globalization, Industrial Policy, and Fragmentation

Key players

Business Ethics: Corporate Conduct, Human Rights, and ESG

Key players

Business Intelligence: Data, Analytics, and Cross-Border Governance

Key players

Business Information Systems: Digital Infrastructure and Cyber Resilience

Key players

Business Law: Cross-Border Commerce, Arbitration, and Regulatory Divergence

Key players

Business Performance Management: Metrics, Productivity, and Accountability

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for International Conference on Economics, Trade and Development (ICETD) 2027.

Recent reporting to ground your prep

House Ethics Committee Pushes Sexual Miscond.

Congressional Ethics Failures

Black Coffee's O2 Show: South African Music's

Haryana's Community Farm Tanks for Water

Lessons

Bite-sized lessons to build the basics

Dynamic Analysis

Hidden Stakeholders

Engagement Strategies

Stakeholder Mapping Workshop

Courses

Guided courses that go deeper on the topic

Crisis Management

Advanced Negotiation

Multilateral Negotiation

Policy Brief Writing

The states in play, with the data that shapes their stance

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Saudi Arabia February 2027

By committee

Committees & topics

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Topics & background

Resources

Related conferences

Saudi IT Security Summit 2026

International Conference on Conflict Resolution and Peacebuilding Strategies (ICCRPBS) 2026

International Conference on Governance and Public Policy (ICGPP-2026)

Global Students Research Conference

International Conference on Historical Sociology and Political Economy (ICHSPE)

International Conference on War, Conflict, and Peacebuilding in the Middle East (ICWCPME-2026)

Frequently asked questions

Committees & topics

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Topics & background

Resources

Related conferences

Saudi IT Security Summit 2026

International Conference on Conflict Resolution and Peacebuilding Strategies (ICCRPBS) 2026

International Conference on Governance and Public Policy (ICGPP-2026)

Global Students Research Conference

International Conference on Historical Sociology and Political Economy (ICHSPE)

International Conference on War, Conflict, and Peacebuilding in the Middle East (ICWCPME-2026)

Frequently asked questions