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 a government jobs report to be released today.

The state has lost 7,200 jobs during the last 13 months and ended last year with the first annual jobs decline since 2001 — the strongest signal yet, economists say, that Rhode Island is at the leading edge of a nationwide recession.

“The U.S. is beginning a recession and it looks like Rhode Island may have gotten a head start,” David A. Wyss, chief economist at Standard & Poors Corp. in New York, said yesterday.

Rhode Island’s unemployment rate last month climbed 0.5 percent, to 5.7 percent — compared with 4.9 percent nationwide — and the number of unemployed residents in the state hit 32,800, the largest number in more than a decade, according to the state Department of Labor and Training.

Nationally, employment fell for the first time in more than four years. The job losses are fueling anxiety that fallout from the mortgage market crisis and declining house prices are infecting the broader economy. So far, the worst effects of the housing and credit troubles have shown up in Florida, California, Arizona, Nevada, Michigan and Ohio.

Rhode Island’s last jobs report, economists say, shows that the housing and credit problems here are spreading into other areas of the local economy.

“Rhode Island has been the weakest economy in New England for some time,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Economy.com, “so I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s the first in recession.”

Zandi said the biggest source of the problem here is “the collapse of the housing market and the surge in mortgage foreclosures.”

The market for “subprime” loans, made to borrowers with blemished credit, was “more widespread” in Rhode Island than the rest of New England, Zandi said, so the collapse has been felt more severely.

Housing values in Rhode Island during the fourth quarter of last year declined more sharply than any other New England state, but far less than in the hardest-hit states, such as Florida and Nevada, according to the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight’s House Price Index.

In Massachusetts, where falling house prices and rising foreclosures are also taking a toll, the labor market so far appears to be holding up better. Massachusetts in January added 900 jobs, though the unemployment rate inched up two-tenths of a percentage point, to 4.5 percent, according to a report released yesterday by the Massachusetts Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development.

Rhode Island’s latest job numbers released today surprised economists, who were unprepared for such a dramatic reversal. Rhode Island labor officials had previously reported that the state in 2007 gained 3,300 jobs, and now find that the revised data shows 5,200 jobs were lost.

“It’s a big swing,” said David Iaia, senior principal economist at the Lexington, Mass., forecasting firm Global Insight. “It definitely shows things are doing much worse than we previously thought.”

Federal and state labor officials revise their job numbers periodically based on more complete data. This “re-benchmark” process often yields revisions, but rarely does it result in such wholesale reversals. The national jobs data also were revised downward in January.

In Rhode Island, the revised data show that construction employment, which is closely tied to the housing market, suffered a bigger hit than originally thought. During the last 12 months, the state has lost 2,300 construction jobs, including 600 last month, according to the revised jobs data. Construction job losses now are almost as large as those in the long-declining manufacturing sector, where jobs fell 2,500 during the same 12-month period.

Professional and business services jobs also fell by 2,100 during the last 12 months, followed by 1,400 jobs lost in financial activities.

During the 1990s recession, Rhode Island lost about 45,000 jobs, a 10-percent decline. Nobody is saying that this recession, if it is one, is likely to result in anywhere near that level of job losses.

Zandi, of Moody’s Economy.com, said he expects the job losses during this recession to be “rather modest” compared with prior recessions. A recession is generally defined as several quarters of declining economic activity coupled with job losses and a cutback in spending.

“The key difference,” Zandi said, “is that businesses going into this one, outside of housing, are in very good financial shape. So they’re going to be loath to reduce payrolls.”

larditi@projo.com