2020 Vision
January 28, 2020
Our annual 50-state report focuses on economic development laws, leaders, policies, indicators and projects from the past year. Use it to form a clearer picture of every state’s business climate.
The collective knowledge and capabilities of the U.S. workforce is worth an estimated $240 trillion,” wrote Joe Parilla, a fellow at Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program, in a December 2019 research note, “four times more valuable than the country’s physical capital stock and 10 times more valuable than all the urban land in the United States.”
What form does that value take? One way to quantify it is by professional certifications. According to the Labor Market Information Institute’s analysis of Current Population Survey data made available by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a total of 18% of the United States civilian non-institutional population aged 16 years or older has a certification or license, ranging from 14.8% in California to 22.1% in Maine.