Carroll County’s unemployment rate continued to inch up in April, though early numbers through the first part of this year suggest the jobless rate may be starting to level off locally and across the state.

In April, 10.5 percent of the Carroll County work force was without a job. That’s up from 10.3 percent in March. More telling, however, is the fact that Carroll County unemployment for the same month last year stood at just 5.7 percent, nearly half of the current rate.

Carroll County’s jobless rate continues to be higher than either the state or the nation as a whole. Georgia unemployment for April stood at 9.3 percent, up from 9.2 percent in March, while the national rate came in at 8.9 percent in April.

Still, local observers see a light at the end of the tunnel.

“Depending on who we talk to, they’re saying they’re seeing a turnaround or they’re getting a sense that it’s close,” said Daniel Jackson, president and chief executive of the Carroll County Chamber of Commerce and Carroll Tomorrow. “Comparing one month to another, it’s difficult to pick up on any long-term pattern, but we’re hoping it is an indicator that maybe we’ve peaked out, and maybe we’re going in the right direction.”

Jackson said job creation begins with consumer confidence. When residents go out and spend money in the local economy, businesses see a marked increase in revenue, allowing those businesses to expand and hire more employees.

“Literally once that machine starts, it’s like a ripple effect across industry,” Jackson said. “Once you get that consumer confidence going, and those who have the money aren’t afraid to go out and spend it, then you can start following that natural progression that comes as a result.”

Even with recent numbers that suggest unemployment may have reached a variable equilibrium, long-term analysis is required before conclusions can be drawn about the health of the job market in a single county, said Dr. David Boldt, a professor of economics with the University of West Georgia.

Month-to-month totals are often influenced greatly by seasonality, Boldt said, skewing the numbers and encouraging false notions of improvement or degradation in the market. For instance, in the months following Christmas, many workers who had temporary jobs through the holiday season find themselves without work, pushing the unemployment rate higher than it would be during other times of the year. The opposite is true leading up to the end of the year when many retailers hire extra help on a temporary basis.

Instead of analyzing numbers from one month to the next, Boldt said, it’s important to compare contemporary totals to that of previous years. While last month’s county unemployment rate was 10.5 percent, the jobless rate during the month of April 2008 was only 5.7 percent, nearly 50 percent lower than it is now. These numbers point to the fact that the job market is still far from what it once was, and only well after the fact will economists be able to point to the moment when the economic recession and all that came as a result began to roll back.

“The problem is when you’re getting data about the economy, it takes a while to gather that,” Boldt said. “They dated this recession eight months after the fact. That shows how long it takes to figure these things out.”

Boldt said that once the billions of dollars allocated in the Obama administration’s stimulus package become fully incorporated into the national economy, noticeable improvements in the job market will likely come as a result, though it’s hard to say when that will be.

“I don’t think we’re in recovery yet,” Boldt said. “All this stimulus stuff has yet to go into effect. When that happens, things might slowly begin to change.”