PrefBlog

The US jobs number was excellent:

The unemployment rate fell to its lowest level in half a century last month, capping the longest streak of job creation in modern times and dispelling recession fears that haunted Wall Street at the start of the year.

The Labor Department reported Friday that employers added 263,000 jobs in April, well above what analysts had forecast. The unemployment rate sank to 3.6 percent.
…
The April data show little threat of troublesome inflation or other signs of excess. The length of the average workweek actually fell, while wage growth for the month was slightly below what was expected. Still, with average hourly earnings up 3.2 percent from a year ago, ordinary workers are finally sharing in the economy’s bounty.

And Canada is going digital:

All in all, Statistics Canada calculates that as of 2017, Canada’s digital economy was worth $109.7 billion, or about 5.5 per cent of the entire economy that year.

That’s a bigger economic bite than mining, quarrying, and oil and gas extraction (4.8 per cent), or retail (five per cent) or the agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting sector took (at 1.8 per cent.)

It still lags behind manufacturing (10 per cent), construction (8.1 per cent) health care (7.5 per cent), and finance and insurance (6.7 per cent).
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Between 2010 and 2017, Canada’s digital economy grew by 40.2 per cent, Statistics Canada said. That compares with 28 per cent in the rest of the economy. The digital economy outpaced the rest of the economy every year in that time frame except in 2011 and 2017, two years that saw strong growth in the energy sector.

Within the digital economy, telecommunications is the biggest sector, but it’s getting caught by other parts. E-commerce is the fastest-growing segment, going from $4.2 billion in 2010 to more than $13.6 billion in 2017.

It would be nice to see some comparable figures from our competitors, but it is nice to see some numbers.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 3rd, 2019 at 10:42 pm and is filed under Market Action. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.