Tunisia and Taipei followed in July and Palma de Mallorca closes the season in October. Five months on, the question for the host that went first is what reaches the journals.
The American Accounting Association’s Journal of International Accounting Research launched a series this year called the Regional International Accounting Research Forum, created to generate contextual research on countries and regions thinly covered by the international accounting literature. Four editions were scheduled for 2026 and three have now run. Kuwait City took the inaugural one at the American University of Kuwait on 28 March, with a pre-session at the Kuwaiti Association of Accountants and Auditors the day before. Hammamet in Tunisia and Taipei followed in July, and Palma de Mallorca closes the season in October.
Kuwait did not receive the opening slot passively. Dr. Ahmad Alqatan, an associate professor of accounting at the Arab Open University in Kuwait who chairs the research and studies committee at the accountants’ association, served as co-chair alongside Samir Trabelsi of Brock University and delivered the closing remarks. Announcing the call for papers, Dr. Alqatan invited submissions on accounting, auditing, corporate governance, sustainability and financial reporting focused on Kuwait and the wider region, at an event he said aimed to “advance accounting research in underrepresented regions.”
The Month It Landed In
The timing was harder than the programme suggested. Boursa Kuwait suspended trading precautionarily at the start of March as regional geopolitical developments hit investor sentiment, three weeks before the forum convened. The first-half numbers, reported on 30 July, show the recovery that followed: net profit of KD 13.74 million on operating revenues of KD 23.39 million, market capitalisation of KD 52.2 billion at the end of the second quarter, up 3.3 percent on the first, and second-quarter traded value of KD 6.1 billion, a rise of 63.9 percent. Kuwait finished the half third among Gulf markets on total return.
The recovery is real but incomplete. Al-Shall Consulting puts first-half liquidity at KD 9.823 billion across 116 sessions, an average of KD 84.7 million a day, down about 22 percent on the same period last year. A market working to rebuild depth after a shock has more use for evidence about its own governance than one simply riding a rally.
Why the Programme Fitted the Market
The forum met a regulatory calendar rather than an academic one. The Capital Markets Authority now requires Premier Market companies to publish sustainability reports, with the first filings covering the 2025 financial year landing this year, and the exchange’s ESG reporting guide sets out 30 indicators referenced to the IFRS S1 and S2 standards. The exchange also launched a bond and sukuk trading platform in April and listed exchange-traded funds in June.
Against that, the March programme reads as a briefing note. Papers covered institutional quality and the accounting environment in emerging economies, and IFRS adoption alongside governance and financial development across the Middle East and North Africa. A panel on rebuilding accounting education for an AI-enabled profession put the association’s president on the same platform as the Kuwait practices of two of the Big Four. The closing session dealt with sustainability regulation and capital markets, which is precisely the file the Capital Markets Authority requirement has opened.
A Circuit, Not a One-Off
The forum sat on top of an existing calendar. In November, Dr. Alqatan organised the twenty-first International Conference on Applied Business and Economics at the Arab Open University in Kuwait with Dr. Afnan Alkhaldi, writing afterwards that he had been “honoured to organise” it. A year before that, Al-Seyassah reported that an international accounting and financial studies conference he organised and directed at the same university drew participants from 18 countries.
The Test That Comes Later
The caveat belongs in any honest account of this. Hosting is comparatively cheap. A country can convene the world’s scholars, fill a programme with visiting presenters and still publish little of its own, and conference circuits in emerging markets have a long record of substituting for research output rather than producing it. Most papers presented in March carried authors from outside Kuwait. The series exists to cover regions the literature neglects, which is a diagnosis of a gap rather than evidence that Kuwait has closed it.
What makes this edition measurable is the mechanism attached. Selected papers go forward for consideration by the Journal of International Accounting Research, so the return on Kuwait’s hosting will appear in a citation database rather than an attendance figure. With Tunisia and Taipei now run and Spain to come, Kuwait’s edition will be read against three peers rather than in isolation. That comparison starts inside a publication cycle.
