The drop in the November unemployment rate for the Pittsburgh area to 7.9 percent from October's rate of 8.3 percent was the largest monthly decline in the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate since April 1998.

It also was the first time the unemployment rate, which is being released today by the state Department of Labor and Industry, has declined in the region in a full two years.

The question left is does this four-tenths of a percentage point decline represent a turnaround for the local economy or a statistical anomaly?

The answer is going to take a while to determine, said Harold Miller, the president of Future Strategies LLC and an economic analyst.

It is not surprising, Mr. Miller said, that the Pittsburgh Metropolitan Statistical Area is doing better than the rest of the country. Throughout the recession, the region's unemployment rate has remained lower than the national average, which was 10 percent for November.

But what is surprising, Mr. Miller said, is that while the national unemployment rate dropped by two-tenths of a percentage point from 10.2 percent in October to 10 percent in November, the local numbers dropped farther.

Mr. Miller said Pittsburgh historically has been slower to slide into recession than the rest of the nation, but it also has lagged behind in the ensuing recoveries.

"What's different is we are doing as well as the rest of the country and even a little bit better than the rest of the country," he said.

A closer look at the seven counties of the Pittsburgh Metropolitan Statistical Area shows that all counties are not doing equally well.

The seasonally adjusted unemployment rates range from 7.1 percent for Butler County, placing Butler's unemployment level nearly three percentage points better than the rest of the country, while Fayette County is experiencing 10.2 percent unemployment, higher than the national average. Butler's unemployment rate dropped nearly an entire percentage point, from 8 percent, though that may be a result of the limitations of the small sampling that makes up the household survey. A similar sampling issue could explain the increase from 9.1 percent unemployment in October to 9.3 percent unemployment in November in Armstrong County, the only local county where unemployment rose.

November marked the first month of the year that Butler had a lower unemployment rate than Allegheny County, which had a rate of 7.4 percent, down from 7.7 in October.

In the payroll survey for the Pittsburgh Metropolitan Statistical Area, manufacturing job losses have stabilized, down 200 jobs for the month, leaving 87,500 manufacturing jobs in the region. Over the past 12 months the region has lost 10,000 manufacturing jobs, making it the employment sector with the most jobs lost over the year. Three years ago when the economy was going strong, in November 2006, there were 99,600 manufacturing jobs in the six-county area.

The number of non-farm payroll jobs are split by the department of Labor and Industry into two categories, goods-production and service-providing.

Goods-producing jobs include mining and logging, construction and manufacturing. Service-providing jobs include financial and administrative work, engineering research, retail, trucking, leisure and hospitality and health and education.

In the last 12 months the number of good-producing jobs dropped by 14,700 or 9 percent from 161,800 jobs in November 2008 to 147,100 jobs last month.

In the service-providing categories the losses were much less severe with 11,900 jobs lost of the 992,200 jobs there had been in November 2008. That translates to a loss of 1.1 percent of those jobs, bringing the total to 980,300 service jobs.

The region also has suffered less severe losses of construction jobs than other areas of the country where housing boomed earlier in the decade then busted over the last 18 months.

Mr. Miller noted the regions' big construction projects - Three PNC, the new arena and the Rivers Casino - were not shut down because of the recession and kept construction workers employed even as the economy slipped.

"That has helped to give us some stability in construction," he said.

Mr. Miller said when the overall jobs numbers, which are little changed with a net loss of 600 non-farm jobs in the region in November, are compared with the shrinking unemployment numbers, the good news is that jobs that are being created in the area are mostly going to people here rather than being taken by people from out of the area.

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