Antoinatte Brooks, of Providence, looks for a second part-time job on line at the state’s job assistance center.

The Providence Journal / Steve Szydlowski

With the Rhode Island unemployment rate rising in September to 8.8 percent and 50,200 people out of work, most local economists and public officials agree that the recession here is among the toughest in the country.

So how do Rhode Islanders get out of this mess?

The Journal asked some local economics professors what advice they would give to Governor Carcieri and other state leaders about how to reverse the employment declines and what can be done to help the state’s economy expand again.

Peter Nigro, of Bryant University, said the state needs to focus more on improving education in Rhode Island, both at the primary and secondary levels.

Nigro is the Sarkisian Chair in Financial Services and associate professor of finance at Bryant’s School of Business.

“We need real public-education reform in Rhode Island,” Nigro said. “Rhode Islanders compete in an increasingly global economy and our public education system is lagging behind most of the rest of the country and world. We will need a better-educated work force to compete in the long run, which will encourage more companies to locate in Rhode Island due to its educated labor force.”

He said that reform won’t necessary cost money.

“We need to be more efficient with the money we spend and hold our educators (and students) accountable. We spend a lot and get little in terms of performance. Why do we have all this town-level administration? Can’t we have some consolidation of school districts?

Nigro said good teachers should be rewarded with raises and underperforming teachers need more training. “Let’s bring them up where they need to be, and if they are not willing to get there, remove them.”

Nigro also said that Rhode Island needs to get its budget in order and to stop promising things that cannot be delivered. For example, he said, the state needs to phase out defined-benefit plans, as the federal government did in the mid-1980s.

“For the defined-benefit plans in place –– we can’t afford them –– it is a ticking time bomb.” The state should look at pushing back the age when people start collecting benefits, he said.

“Increasing taxes will not fix this and probably make the problem worse.”

“We are in a recession,” he added. “The only good news is that in recent years, the Federal Reserve has implemented policies to reduce the duration of recessions.”

However, “we will not be as lucky as last time [2001-2002] when we had a brief recession.”

Leonard Lardaro, of the University of Rhode Island, said that first of all, state leaders need to give an honest assessment of the state’s economy, recognize the recession is deepening and then take action.

“The governor and the legislature — they should be meeting and dealing with this as a crisis,” Lardaro said. “We really can’t be reactive. We have to get on top of this because the national and global economies are weakening.”

What specifically should be done?

“The problem is, there are no quick fixes,” he said, “…unless you want to consider some very short-term one-time measures.” That could include some kind of temporary tax, perhaps on income, to raise money to pay for a jobs initiative.

“Something temporary, trying to take unemployed people and put them to work,” he said.

Lardaro said he was reluctant even to suggest higher taxes because such hikes generally slow down the economy.

“I find this very repulsive, but Rhode Island has really backed itself in a corner.”

Over the long term, he said, the state needs to rewrite its tax structure and state regulations so that existing companies can expand and new firms will want to come here. And it needs to invest more in higher education and to make sure that tuitions don’t push a college education out of reach.

“We do need a major realignment of spending and spending priorities,” Lardaro said. “We can’t sustain the kind of spending levels and momentum.”

He also said that the crisis could have a positive outcome if the state focuses on developing a “knowledge-based” economy. “This is an opportunity for Rhode Island to reinvent itself, if we take that opportunity.”

tbarmann@projo.com