OTTAWA, May 3 (Xinhua) -- Canada's digital economy was worth 109.7 billion Canadian dollars (about 82 billion U.S. dollars), or about 5.5 percent of its entire economy in 2017, according to Statistics Canada Friday.
While the digital economy is not an industry, to give a sense of its scale, it was larger as a proportion of the total economy than mining, quarrying and oil and gas extraction (4.8 percent), transportation and warehousing (4.6 percent) and utilities (2.4 percent).
Between 2010 and 2017, Canada's digital economy grew 40.2 percent at a faster pace than its overall economy 28 percent.
On an annual basis, the digital economy increased more than the total economy every year except in 2011 and 2017, which were years of strong growth in the energy sector.
There were 886,114 jobs in the digital economy in 2017, about 4.7 percent of all the jobs that year,almost three times the 329,600 people who worked in forestry, fishing, mining, quarrying, oil and gas that year.
The digital job market is growing faster than the regular one, too. Its job market grew by 37 percent between 2010 and 2017. That compares to 8.6 percent growth in the rest of the economy over that period.
The largest contributors to digital economy jobs in 2017 were support services with 30.2 percent, followed by e-commerce at 18.6 percent.
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