The 5,200 jobs that vanished from Rhode Island’s payrolls last year were better-paying than the jobs the state gained, according to an analysis of state data.

Construction workers, mortgage brokers, loan officers and real-estate agents were among the hardest hit by job losses, due largely to the housing and credit-market problems, according to revised data released last week by the state Department of Labor and Training.

The average annual wage in the financial activities sector in 2006, the latest year available, was $53,728, among the highest of any industry, the state data shows. Construction wages averaged $46,668.

Meanwhile, the biggest job gains last year were in health care and social assistance, where the average annual wage in 2006 was $37,618, followed by private education, where the average wage was $39,804, according to the state data.

For years, the state has been replacing higher-wage manufacturing jobs with lower-wage services jobs. Now, higher-paying jobs in sectors tied to the real estate and credit markets are leaving, too.

The jobs losses — 7,200 during the last 13 months — offered the strongest signal yet, economists say, that Rhode Island is at the leading edge of a nationwide recession.

The revised jobs numbers released last week turned what was originally reported as a 3,300-job gain last year into a 5,200-job loss — the first annual job decline since 2001.

State labor officials revise the job numbers annually based on payroll-tax reports, which they use to “benchmark” their monthly estimates, which they gather from sample surveys of about 1,000 to 1,500 employers. The process often yields revisions, but rarely this large.

Last year’s job losses were a “major surprise,” said Edward M. Mazze, professor of business administration at the University of Rhode Island. “I thought we were gaining jobs.”

He said the state Economic Development Corporation should report each month the names of the companies that are adding jobs to improve reporting accuracy.

“There is no reason why you’d want to hide that information,” Mazze said. “Why not identify the source of where the job is?”

Rhode Island’s small size means that even minor revisions can result in major shifts. The margin of error for the monthly job estimates is plus or minus 10,800 jobs, or roughly 2.2 percent, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The revised data show that construction employment actually began declining last April, when jobs fell by 900, yet state labor officials who were basing their data on sample surveys of employers reported that construction jobs were growing. State labor officials attributed what they reported as a rise in construction jobs last June to a surge in new hotel and condo building.

The day the June jobs report was released, Governor Carcieri declared that he had reached his goal of creating 5,000 new jobs per year during his first four years in office. At the time, he had been in office for 4½ years. “While we didn’t reach this goal as quickly as I’d hoped,” he said in a news release at the time, “we have made real progress for Rhode Island workers.”

But the revised jobs data now show that during the first six months of last year the state had already shed 1,900 jobs.

That was in July, just one month before the credit markets collapsed amidst soaring default rates among homeowners with subprime mortgages. In August, jobs in the state’s financial sector began to disappear.

Rhode Island employers last month shed an estimated 1,700 jobs, and the state unemployment rate in January climbed to 5.7 percent, the highest since 1995, according to the revised jobs report released Feb. 29.

“The governor is very concerned about the job losses,” Carcieri spokeswoman Barbara Trainor said yesterday, and is “holding the line on government spending to help prevent tax increases, and that’s a key tactic to improve the business climate in the state.”

The governor thought the “size of the discrepancy” of the jobs report before and after the revision was “surprising,” Trainor said, but it parallels the revision during the recession in 1991.

That year, the state originally reported that in 1990, Rhode Island lost 13,200 jobs, or 2.9 percent of all payroll jobs. State labor officials later revised those estimates to show that the state actually lost 30,200 jobs, a decrease of 6.7 percent, said Donna Murray, of the state Department of Labor and Training.R.I. employment changes

Source: R.I. Dept. of Labor and Trainin

larditi@projo.com