Updates

The new Religious Freedom page adds a set of indexes of religious freedom, listed by country and by province. The indexes represent an average of data from the ARDA and the Pew Forum covering the period 2000-2007.


Also this quarter a new field "Religions Over 1 Percent" now provides WRD best estimates of the major religions in every province of the world (available for adding to any province query). This quarter also sees Hong Kong and Macau added as countries, while several smaller countries have been removed, resulting in a list of 232 countries even more closely aligned with the underlying UN population demographics.

The base year of WRD has now moved from mid-2005 data to current projections for mid-2010. The update also includes the addition of 1950 and 2010 as a data points in the time series of religions by country. This means that estimates for the number of religionists in every country of the world are now reconciled with the United Nations population projections for mid-2010. The update includes statistics on all world religions as well as the peoples (first round of projections), cities, provinces and country tables.