Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
The number of Muslims around the world is projected to increase rapidly in the decades ahead, growing from about 1.6 billion in 2010 to nearly 2.8 billion in 2050.[1. numoffset=”40″ For more information about Islam and its major branches (Sunni and Shia), see “Defining the Religious Groups.”] Muslims are expected to grow twice as fast […]
Christians are projected to remain the largest religious group in North America in the decades ahead, and their numbers are expected to increase from 267 million as of 2010 to 287 million in 2050.[1. numoffset=”66″ North America includes Bermuda, Canada, Greenland, the Saint Pierre and Miquelon Islands and the United States. (For the purposes of […]
This appendix details the methods used in this study to project changes in the population size and geographic distribution of eight major religious groups from 2010 to 2050. It is organized in five sections. The first section explains how the baseline (2010) religious composition estimates were derived. The second section describes how key input data […]
The U.S. population is undergoing a variety of demographic changes. For example, racial and ethnic diversity has been increasing as non-Hispanic whites have declined as a share of the population. And the share of adults who are married has been declining for decades. These broader changes are reflected within many of the major religious groups […]
The number of Hindus around the world is projected to rise from slightly more than 1 billion in 2010 to nearly 1.4 billion in 2050. This increase will roughly keep pace with overall population growth. As a result, Hindus will remain fairly stable as a share of the world’s population over the next four decades, […]
As of 2010, nearly a third of the world’s population identified as Christian. But if demographic trends persist, Islam will close the gap by the middle of the 21st century.
The number of Buddhists around the world is expected to increase between 2010 and 2030, rising from 488 million to about 511 million. However, the global Buddhist population is projected to decline after 2030, falling to 486 million by 2050, roughly where it was in 2010.[1. numoffset=”45″ For more information about Buddhism and its different […]
As of 2010, there were nearly 14 million Jews around the world. In 2050, the Jewish population is expected to number about 16 million. The share of the world’s population that is Jewish – 0.2% – is expected to remain about the same in 2050 as it was in 2010. Over the next few decades, […]
Updated August 13, 2015: This new edition includes corrected estimates for Iceland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Taiwan, and some related aggregated data. This study estimates the population distributions by per capita income in 2001 and 2011 in 111 countries. The distributions are derived from household survey data collected in each country. For most countries, however, […]