For the first time in nearly three years, Rhode Island’s unemployment rate dropped, to 12.9 percent in October, offering a faint but reassuring sign that the state’s economy may be on the road to improvement.

Despite inching down from an all-time high of 13 percent in September, however, Rhode Island’s jobless level still far surpasses those of other New England states.

According to numbers released Friday by the Department of Labor and Training, 73,300 Rhode Islanders remain out of work.

And the state continues to bleed jobs, losing 1,100 more in October, a separate survey of employers shows. The work force also contracted, a potential signal that some of the most discouraged workers may have given up looking for work entirely.

Given that, economists caution not to read too much into the one-month dip.

“We cannot take a small drop in the unemployment rate as a sign that the job market is turning around, that’s the bottom line,” said economist Edinaldo Tebaldi, a Bryant University professor. “Until I see jobs growing, this is just about perception. If you’re not creating jobs, you’re not creating income, and without income, you have no demand to create new jobs, and we are stuck.”

In recent weeks, Tebaldi and the New England Economic Partnership, a nonprofit regional forecasting group, predicted that the state unemployment rate will soar to 14.1 percent in the second quarter of 2010, and the state will shed another 9,000 jobs, before starting the long, slow recovery. They don’t expect to see an unemployment rate below 10 percent until 2012.

Tebaldi and fellow forecaster Edward M. Mazze, of the University of Rhode Island, said Thursday they have no plans to revise those grim forecasts and expect the unemployment rate to climb back up, particularly after the first of the year when post-holiday struggles could lead to layoffs.

Michael Lynch, a regional economist for IHS Global Insight, the economic forecasting and analysis firm, reiterated those warnings, calling it “a dangerous thing” to rely too heavily on one month’s numbers.

Yet Sandra Powell, director of the state Department of Labor and Training, offered a more optimistic take. “We’re very happy that the unemployment [number] tracked down a tenth of a percentage point. It might indicate there is some stabilization starting to take place in terms of where Rhode Island is with its recession,” she said. “But it’s one month, so obviously we want to look forward and see what will happen next month.”

THE LAST TIME the state’s unemployment actually went down was in January 2007, when the rate was 4.8 percent and the recession was first starting to flex its muscle here, long before it had done so in other states.

The latest drop runs counter to the national unemployment rate, which hit 10.2 percent in October, climbing into double digits for the first time in decades.

In Massachusetts, the jobless rate plunged nearly half a percentage point to 8.9 percent, the Massachusetts Office of Labor and Workforce Development reported Thursday. Robb Smith, director of policy and planning, called the drop “the largest single-month decrease we’ve recorded since 1976,” and attributed the change, in part, to strong gains in the areas of business and professional services.

In Rhode Island, retail and government sectors saw particularly steep declines in October. The loss of 600 retail jobs was noteworthy because it came at a time of year when holiday hiring typically picks up. Powell called the slide a sign of “weak seasonal hiring.”

The state attributes the drop off of 500 government jobs to non-education layoffs in cities and towns as a result of the budget crunch at the local level.

On the positive side, Rhode Island added 400 jobs in construction, one of the hardest-hit industries in this recession. It also saw the addition of 500 positions in the health-care sector.

Overall, the loss of 1,100 jobs was far less profound than in September, when Rhode Island employers trimmed their payrolls by 2,800 jobs.

“But on a month-to-month basis, you will always see a lot of volatility,” said Lynch of IHS Global Insight.

“You will see a month where jobs losses really soften, or where unemployment really [dips], but that doesn’t account for or reverse what is really a very clear trend we’ve been seeing up until this point: We don’t see immediate improvement coming into the U.S. economy, and that will weigh on Rhode Island as well.”

cneedham@projo.com