PROVIDENCE — Governor Carcieri is merging two agencies designed to buoy the state’s economy, the Economic Development Corporation and the Rhode Island Economic Policy Council.

The reorganization eliminates the council’s four staff members and shutters its headquarters at a time of anemic job growth and falling real-estate values in Rhode Island.

But it preserves what many see as the council’s principal advantage: its 27-member board, made up of leading business and political figures including Paul J. Choquette Jr., chief executive officer of Gilbane Inc., and Providence Mayor David N. Cicilline.

The council “is an important body of the state’s business, university and government leaders and plays a key role in shaping and actively communicating a clear economic development vision for Rhode Island,” Carcieri said in a statement yesterday. “I will ask the council to lead the private sector effort to improve our business and tax climate and to accelerate our positioning as a high-wage knowledge economy.”

The future of the council has been uncertain since last month, when Carcieri cut $300,000 from its budget in his proposed spending plan for the next fiscal year. The council’s only other support comes from $300,000 in private contributions.

Lawmakers need to reduce state spending by more than $400 million next year.

Saul Kaplan, the executive director of the EDC, said merging the agencies will help the state focus its economic development strategy. Though he already sits on the council’s board, Kaplan said he now anticipates improved coordination.

“To have two separate organizations doesn’t make sense,” Kaplan said in an interview yesterday. “We need one economic development strategy and we need a laser-like focus on implementation.”

The council, led by Christopher L. Bergstrom, employed a secretary and two staff members, Beth Ashman Collins, the director of research, and Ariana E. McBride, the economic development planner. They moved into a new office, at 17 Gordon Ave., about a year ago.

Bergstrom is not taking a position at the EDC. Choquette, who chairs the council with Carcieri, is stepping down from that position. He will remain on the board.

The EDC is much larger agency. It has 46 employees, a $6-million budget and oversight over the Quonset Development Corporation, which will spend about $6.4 million this year running the Quonset Business Park in North Kingstown.

Kaplan, the governor’s top economic adviser, has been under increasing pressure of late to create high-paying jobs to boost state tax receipts and lift communities beaten down by declines in manufacturing.

In an op-ed published last month in The Providence Journal, the chairman of the powerful House Finance Committee, Steven M. Costantino, said the state should “redesign the mission” of the EDC.

Since then, Rhode Island has endured its steepest monthly decline in real-estate value in at least 19 years, with the median price of a single-family house dropping 12.8 percent from January 2007 to this past January.

Last month, a new government jobs report revealed that Rhode Island lost 1,700 jobs in January, pushing up its unemployment level to 5.7 percent, the highest since 1995.

“Rhode Island,” Kaplan said in an op-ed in The Providence Sunday Journal, “is facing hard economic times.”

Against that backdrop, some members of the Economic Policy Council have begun chafing against its think tank approach. At a recent council meeting, several board members said specific actions were more important than policy papers and seminars.

“This report I’ve seen 30 times over the last 20 years,” Sen. William A. Walaska, D-Warwick, said at the January council meeting, referring to a 35-page economic strategy document. “We’ve got to get out in the business community and find out what the people need.”

bgedan@projo.com