RALEIGH – Upon Monday’s announcement that North Carolina’s jobless rate had ticked up a tenth of a percentage point last month, the usual public officials and observers said the usual things. Professional boosters and those in political power found nuggets of good news to champion. Skeptics and those not yet in political power pointed to other measures.

Tune it all out for a moment. Month-to-month changes in employment statistics don’t really merit devoting a lot of time and energy to their careful analysis. These data are snapshots of a constantly changing economy, and often prove to be fleeting ones as the statistics are revised over time.

It would be more useful to consider the import of longer-term trends in the North Carolina economy. It’ll help you better understand and evaluate completing claims about the state’s economic competitiveness.

Over the past year, the number of people employed in North Carolina has barely budged – 4,031,490 in December 2010 vs. 4,029,075 in December 2009. How, then, has the state’s unemployment rate showed a decline of more than a percentage point, to 9.8 percent last month vs. 10.9 percent in December 2009?

Because nearly 53,000 North Carolinians who were counted as unemployed in December 2009 are no longer counted as unemployed now. It’s not that they found jobs. They simply dropped out of the official labor force altogether. They either gave up, moved elsewhere, retired, or entered the underground economy.

It is impossible to spin the trend over the past year as anything other than as signifying continued economic weakness. North Carolina may have exited the Great Recession in 2009 according to the usual technical definitions, but our “recovery” has been a puny one.

Expanding the time period further allows more room for political spin about North Carolina’s economic performance. But I happen to think the boosters have a weaker case.

I recently pulled down gross domestic product data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. I wanted to see how North Carolina’s performance compared to other states over the past decade.

From 1999 to 2009, North Carolina’s GDP grew by 20 percent after inflation – about the same rate as the national average. But the picture looks quite different when the number is adjusted for population growth. Real per-capita GDP grew by only 2 percent in North Carolina over the past decade, vs. 5 percent across the Southeast and 9 percent for the nation as a whole.

Both measures are useful. Certainly if you are looking for healthy communities, you typically want to see population growth, not population stagnation or decline. On the other hand, some of the mental pictures popular among North Carolina’s political class about the nature of the state’s recent growth are difficult to square with reality of 2 percent growth in per-capita GDP or real declines in per-capita income.

If our population growth primarily reflected the effect of large numbers of entrepreneurs, managers, professionals, and upwardly mobile people being attracted to North Carolina’s economic and educational offerings, as the usual liberal spin would have it, then per-capita economic output and personal incomes should have been rising significantly. Neither has.

Instead, a large share of recent arrivals to North Carolina have had lower-than-average incomes – either because they are low-skill immigrants from other states or countries, or are either too young or old to be in the workforce. The vast majority of GDP growth in North Carolina over the past decade is attributable to such population inflows, not to real increases in output or incomes per capita.

There is a market for economic information, as for any other valuable good or service. As more people come to recognize North Carolina’s weak performance in job creation, the population trend will probably change. In the meantime, many of the people moving to our state expecting to find the economic opportunities they lack back home are in for a rude awakening.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.