The April employment numbers released Friday show that North Carolina’s unemployment rate is continuing to drop, with 6.2 percent of the state’s residents out of work and looking for jobs.

The drop is a full 2.2 percentage points lower than what it was last April, when 8.4 percent of the state’s labor force was looking for work.

Republican Gov. Pat McCrory, in a written statement, hailed the unemployment drop as a success, but said more progress is still needed.

“We continue to see encouraging signs in North Carolina’s economy with each month that passes,” McCrory said.

Today’s job numbers (click here to read the whole report) show that the state added 14,000 from March to April, and that the overall labor pool (which includes those on the job and those actively looking for work) also grew by about 10,000 from the previous month.

Here’s a quick glimpse of the number’s released today by state commerce department’s labor and economics division:

Source: N.C. Commerce Department

The larger meaning of jobs report data have become heated topics in policy and political circles, with sometimes competing theories about what the steady drop of unemployment in the state means.

The state’s labor pool is significantly lower (by 33,005 people) than it was a year ago, a circumstance that has led some, including the N.C. Justice Center’s Budget and Tax Center, to point out that many of the state’s long-term unemployed stopped looking for work and are not being accounted for in federal labor data. That comes after the state slashed both the length and amount of unemployment people can collect as part of an extensive overhaul of the unemployment system last year.

The state is also seeing huge disparity in different regions when it comes to unemployment, with areas surrounding the economic powerhouses of the Triangle and Charlotte showing low unemployment while more troubled areas still have counties with unemployment topping 10 percent.

Dare, Edgecombe, Graham, Hyde  Scotland and Swain counties all had unemployment rates over 10 percent in March. (Note, these numbers are not seasonally-adjusted, unlike the statewide numbers released today.)

Supporters of that unemployment reform policy, including McCrory and other Republican leaders, say the drop in benefits may have spurred many of the jobless to accept jobs they wouldn’t otherwise have looked at.

The Washington Post had this national perspective on the shrinking labor pool last year, finding that the contracting stems from a combination of the baby-boom generation entering into retirement, younger workers headed back to school and the long-term jobless throwing up their hands.

Here’s a great explainer from the New York Times earlier this month about how federal jobs data (which is released every month and is based on surveys) can fit a number of different narratives (economy better, economy worse, more jobs, less jobs) and all be right.

From the aptly-tilted article, “How Not to be Mislead by the Jobs Report“:

We obsess far too much on the Labor Department’s monthly jobs report.

Think about it this way: It’s the first Friday of the month, and the Labor Department has bad news. The economy has added a mere 64,000 jobs last month, a steep slowdown from 220,000 the month before. From Wall Street to Twitter, the reaction is swift and negative.

The price of oil falls, as do the prices of blue-chip stocks like General Electric. The Federal Reserve faces calls to push interest rates lower. The lead headlines in the next day’s papers talk of faltering job growth.

But what if all the worries were based on nothing more than random statistical noise? What if the apparent decline in job growth came from the inherent volatility of surveys that rely on samples, like the survey that produces the Labor Department’s monthly employment estimate?

You can read more here.

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