Rhode Island’s unemployment rate last month climbed to 9.3 percent, the highest since 1983, as job cuts in the private and public sectors coursed through nearly every part of the economy, a government report released today shows.

Factories, offices and retail stores, among others, slashed payrolls in October, eliminating 2,400 jobs, according to the Rhode Island Department of Labor and Training. The ranks of the unemployed last month swelled to nearly 53,000, the highest on record.

Rhode Island’s October unemployment rate is identical to that of Michigan, where Detroit’s Big Three automakers this week pleaded for American taxpayers to help their industry as prospects of receiving federal rescue aid dimmed.

The latest jobs report is grim even in light of the economic forecast released yesterday by the nonprofit New England Economic Partnership. The NEEP economists predicted that during the next two years, Rhode Island would lose nearly 15,000 more jobs and unemployment would hit 10 percent, probably by the end of next year.

But the pace of the decline is swifter than predicted. The October job losses already account for more than 70 percent of the 3,400 jobs that NEEP had forecast the state would lose during October, this month and next month.

“It’s moving very fast,” said Edinaldo Tebaldi, assistant professor of economics at Bryant University and NEEP’s co-forecaster for Rhode Island. “What’s happening is even worse than we expected.”

The economy nationwide is deteriorating more rapidly than anticipated, he said, as data released yesterday showed that national unemployment insurance claims last week were the highest since December 1982.

The NEEP forecast for Rhode Island was being revised yesterday, Tibaldi said, to show a loss of 4,800 jobs during the last three months of this year.

“I said several months ago it was going to get worse before it gets better and, clearly, that’s happening,” Governor Carcieri said Wednesday at a meeting of the state Economic Policy Council. “We’re still in for some tough sledding.”

Carcieri said that Rhode Island’s small companies have so far accounted for the bulk of the job cuts in the state. “We haven’t seen significant cutbacks yet” among the large employers in the state, he said.

The Carcieri administration has been trying to close the state’s budget deficit by shrinking government payrolls, primarily through retirements. Last month’s payroll job losses included 1,000 government workers, including 500 state workers most of whom retired, a labor official said. The decline follows a 1,300-job loss in government in September, primarily due to state employees retiring in anticipation of changes in the state’s retiree health benefits.

So far this year, the three sectors with the biggest job losses are manufacturing (2,600), professional and business services (2,400) and retail employment (2,300), according to the state jobs report. Employment in construction and finance both declined during the last 10 months by 1,300 jobs each.

Temporary employment agencies and janitorial services reported among the biggest losses in the professional and business services sector.

Employment in health care and social assistance increased last month by 600, with the biggest gains in ambulatory health-care services. Health care has been called by some economists “recession-proof” because the sector has continued to grow even during prior recessions.

—With reports by staff writer Paul Grimaldi

larditi@projo.com