Job growth in Bay State not as prosperous as prior stats show

The BLS, the principal fact-finding agency for the U.S. Department of Labor, revised its previous findings to reveal the department originally overvalued the amount of jobs created in the Commonwealth last year by about 31,600 jobs, a 347-percent overestimation.

The BLS reported earlier this month that Massachusetts gained only 9,100 jobs in 2011, down from its earlier estimate of about 40,700 jobs.

Critics of Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick said the revised numbers reflected poorly on his administration’s economic policies and his claims the Massachusetts economy is performing better than the rest of the nation.

“It appears Gov. Patrick is more concerned with grabbing favorable headlines than he is with getting families back to work,” said the Massachusetts Republican Party in a press release Wednesday.

However, The Boston Globe pointed to the Patrick administration’s approach to the figures last week, reporting his administration continued to stand by the state’s fifth-place ranking despite knowledge that the numbers had changed.

Patrick used the unrevised BLS numbers to cast his administration in favorable light as compared to that of his predecessor and Republican presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney as recently as Monday, according to The Globe.

Jason Lefferts, a Patrick administration spokesman, said job numbers are only “one part of the puzzle” when measuring economic well-being. He said critics and others should take note of other data, such as the state’s increasing revenue from payroll taxes and exports.

“The overwhelming picture is that Massachusetts is doing better than the rest of the country,” he said, referring to the BLS’s announcement Thursday that the Bay State created 9,000 new jobs in February alone.

The BLS also revised its original January numbers from 6,600 new jobs to 13,000.

“What the revised [2011] numbers are saying is that we created nine to 10 thousand jobs all of last year,” said Lefferts. “What these numbers from January and February are saying is that we created 22,000 jobs in Massachusetts in two months.”

This amounts to a 0.7-percent growth rate in jobs in the state, which included a 0.9-percent growth rate in private sector jobs, said Greg Freed, the director of communications at the Massachusetts Department of Labor and Workforce Development.

Those 2012 findings will likely be revised significantly since business establishments open and close over time, said Professor Kevin Lang, who teaches labor economics at Boston University.

“The BLS has to reweight the data to reflect these changes,” Lang said. “This probably accounts for most of the revision to the annual data.”

Lang said he advised caution in evaluating any government policies on job growth, adding that this type of BLS data often appears different in the long term and does not take into account other factors that influence the economic health of a state, such as the distribution of income.

Lang said that the long-term success of a state’s economy depends more on its regulatory environment, public infrastructure and workforce quality.

“There is relatively little that governors or state legislatures can do,” he said, “to affect the economy in the short term.”