Arkansas’ unemployment rate remained stuck at 7.2 percent in March for the the third-straight month, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistic said Friday.

The unemployment rate in Arkansas has been 7.2 percent every month since October, except for a dip to 7.1 percent in December.

The national unemployment rate was 7.6 percent in March, down from 7.7 percent in February.

The size of the civilian labor force - the sum of those employed and those listed as unemployed - shrank again in March. There were 1,330,000 Arkansans in the labor force in March, 35,100 fewer than in March 2012.

The state’s labor force has contracted every month since January 2012 for a total loss of almost 37,700.

There are several reasons why the labor force can be declining, including people who retire, return to college, receive disability or simply stop looking for a job, economists said. Arkansans who have given up searching for a job are not counted as unemployed and aren’t included in the total work-force number.

Michael Pakko, chief economist at the Institute for Economic Advancement at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, and Kathy Deck, director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, say they have watched the steady decline but are finding it difficult to explain.

“The underlying statistics for the unemployment rate are still a bit of a puzzle and somewhat troubling to me,” Pakko said.

March also was the 13thstraight month that there was a drop in the number of Arkansans employed, Pakko said. The number of unemployed Arkansans has remained at 96,000 the past two months, he noted.

The puzzling aspect, Pakko said, is that the two surveys of employment in the state are showing conflicting information.

Arkansas’ unemployment rate is calculated through a survey of about 800 households in the state.

That survey is showing the steady decline in the labor force and the number of employed Arkansans.

But a more comprehensive poll - taken from payroll data submitted by thousands of Arkansas employers to the government - indicates that the number of jobs in the state is rising.

That survey showed jobs in March rose by 3,200 over March last year.

“The payroll survey is not showing the same weakness as the household survey,” Pakko said. “The year-over year changes in the payroll survey are not great but they are positive.”

The relatively large drop in the labor force in the household survey in the past two months - a decline of 14,500 - is unlike any two month drop the state has seen in the past 15 years, Deck said.

“If you think about the fundamentals of our economy, if we had heard about massive layoffs or a hurricane or some other reason to point to, it would be more understanding about the data,” Deck said. “But when we see the labor force dropping really substantially in these two months, you need to find a reason. But I don’t have a reason.”

Even with the number of nonfarm payroll jobs increasing slowly in the past year, Arkansas still is under performing compared with the country overall, Deck said.

“We continue to see Arkansas be weaker across the sectors than the nation,” Deck said. “Nationally, we see all of the private sectors growing on a year-over-year basis. More than half [of the 11 sectors] are still declining.”

Arkansas is like a four cylinder engine firing on only two cylinders, said Greg Kaza, executive director of the Arkansas Policy Foundation, a conservative research and advocacy group in Little Rock.

Since June 2009, when the recession ended, the U.S. labor market has expanded by 3.5 percent while Arkansas’ labor market has grown by only 2.1 percent, Kaza said.

Five industry sectors in Arkansas have fewer jobs now than they did in June 2009, Kaza said.

That includes manufacturing with 6,200 fewer jobs; construction with 6,100 fewer jobs; “other services” with 3,000 fewer jobs; financial activities with 1,500 fewer jobs; and mining with 200 fewer jobs, Kaza said.

“[The] trade transportation and utilities [sector] is the one bright spot in Arkansas’ labor market, expanding 6.6 percent versus the U.S. average of 3.5 percent,” Kaza said.

Business, Pages 29 on 04/20/2013