Total Environmental Scan

Today the U.S. Census Bureau is releasing results from the 2020 Census, marking the 24th time the nation’s population has been counted since the first census in 1790, when there were just 3.9 million people living in the United States.

The first census helped build the foundation of our democracy, and the census continues to be a cornerstone for our growing nation.

According to the 2020 Census, there were 331,449,281 people living in the United States as of April 1, 2020, which represents a growth of 7.4% since 2010. In the last 100 years, our nation has tripled in size.

Published since 1962, PRB’s annual World Population Data Sheet tracks global population data. This year’s edition provides 24 population indicators for more than 200 countries and territories. Users can also explore key trends through an interactive map.

“As the experience with the COVID-19 pandemic has shown us, population changes such as aging and rapid urbanization are important factors for countries to consider as they plan for future disease outbreaks, long-term health care needs and other developments,” said Jeff Jordan, PRB president and CEO. “PRB’s World Population Data Sheet provides objective data and analysis policymakers need to make these decisions.”

Among the key findings for 2020:

The coronavirus, or COVID-19, has been declared by the World Health Organization to be a global pandemic. As the number of people infected in the United States grows exponentially, we must focus on prevention and containment in the criminal and immigration legal systems. Vera and Community Oriented Correctional Health Services have created a series of fact sheets to guide actors in these systems, who have a unique and critical role to play.

The year 2030 marks a demographic turning point for the United States. Beginning that year, all baby boomers will be older than 65 years of age. This will expand the size of the older population so that one in every five Americans is projected to be of retirement age. Later that decade, by 2034, we project that older adults will outnumber children for the first time in U.S. history. The year 2030 marks another demographic first for the United States. That year, because of population aging, immigration is projected to overtake natural increase (the excess of births over deaths) as the primary driver of population growth for the country.
 

COVID-19 has disrupted all forms of human mobility through the closing of national borders and halting of travel worldwide. Preliminary estimates suggest that the pandemic may have slowed the growth in the stock of international migrants by around two million by mid-2020, 27 percent less than the growth expected since mid-2019, according to a report by the United Nations.

Growth in the number of international migrants has been robust over the last two decades, reaching 281 million people living outside their country of origin in 2020, up from 173 million in 2000 and 221 million in 2010.  Currently, international migrants represent about 3.6 per cent of the world’s population.

This website features all the BOP Coronavirus resources, policies, guidance and statistics.

Employers in the United States are increasingly in pursuit of workers who are adept in social skills, like negotiation and persuasion, and have a strong grounding in fundamental skills, such as critical thinking and writing. In the past nearly four decades, employment in the U.S. has expanded most rapidly in jobs in which these skill sets are most valued. Jobs attaching greater importance to analytical skills, such as science, mathematics and programming, are also hiring workers at a brisk pace. 

The COVID-19 pandemic-induced lockdowns and related global recession of 2020 have created a highly uncertain outlook for the labour market and accelerated the arrival of the future of work. The Future of Jobs Report 2020 aims to shed light on: 1) the pandemic-related disruptions thus far in 2020, contextualized within a longer history of economic cycles, and 2) the expected outlook for technology adoption jobs and skills in the next five years. Despite the currently high degree of uncertainty, the report uses a unique combination of qualitative and quantitative intelligence to expand the knowledge base about the future of jobs and skills.

Local jurisdictions, faced with caseloads of increasing complexity and cost, have adopted alternative approaches to criminal case processing — including the use of new technologies — that have the potential to reduce backlog and improve judicial efficiency. Telepresence technology, which allows an individual or group of individuals to appear in a court proceeding from a remote location, is one example of such a technology. On behalf of the National Institute of Justice, RTI International and the RAND Corporation convened the Court Appearances Through Telepresence Advisory Workshop in November 2018 as part of the Priority Criminal Justice Needs Initiative.

Mandatory spending by the federal government totaled $4.6 trillion in 2020, of which $1.9 trillion was for Social Security and Medicare.

Pew Research Center conducted this study to understand Americans’ assessments of their personal financial situation during the current period of economic slowdown and high unemployment rates caused by the coronavirus outbreak. For this analysis, they surveyed 4,917 U.S. adults in April 2020. Everyone who took part is a member of Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses.