For this Ash Wednesday market size post, we looked up the size of the worldwide Catholic population, presented below. According to the source, half of all Catholics (49.4%) live in the Americas, a region of the world that contains about 14% of total world population.

Geographic reference: World
Year: 2009
Market size: 1.181 billion.
Source: “World Catholic Population Growing; Mixed Results on Priestly, Religious Vocations,” CatholicCulture.org, February 21, 2011, available online here.
Original source: Annuario Pontifico, 2011 edition, The Vatican.

Today is Eid al Adha, an important Muslim holiday which marks the end of Hajj, the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. The name of this holiday is usually translated as “Festival of Sacrifice”. With a nod of recognition of this holiday we look today at the size of the Muslim population worldwide. We have always used the term “market” quite broadly on this site, measuring everything from the size of the market for cement to the size of the voting population and the size of the demand for pumpkins, jack-o-lanterns, and candy around Halloween.

The population size presented here is taken from a Pew Research Center report which provides a great deal of interesting information about Muslims around the word. A link to that report is provided in the source note below.

Geographic reference: World
Year: 2009
Market size: 1.57 billion
Source: “Mapping the Global Muslim Population; A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World’s Muslim Population,” The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, October 7, 2009, available online here.
Original source: Pew Research Center