In February the government's Information Service said it expected the population to shrink another 2.8 million by 2005. Despite the growth of Islam in recent years, at least one reference work is predicting that Christianity's share of the world's population will grow by 2050. Christians now number 2 billion and are divided into 33,820 denominations and churches, in 238 countries, and use 7,100 languages, the encyclopedia says. The first edition of this encyclopedia arrived 20 years ago. The encyclopedia estimates there are about 10,000 religions in the world.
Christians are in the majority in two-thirds of the world's countries.
By 2020, psychological depression will be the No. 1 cause of incapacity in developed countries, and No. 2 among the world's most frequent illnesses, an official predicts.