As the statewide unemployment numbers begin to decline, so do those in the four counties of the Roanoke-Chowan area.

On Tuesday, the North Carolina Department of Commerce released its November, 2013 report on unemployment across the state. Those statistics revealed that not only did the Roanoke-Chowan area counties all show a lower number of unemployed workers between October and November, but those figures were drastically lower than one year ago.

The largest drop came in Bertie County where the November numbers showed an unemployment rate of 9.4 percent, down from 10.3 percent in October. Compared to the same time in 2012, Bertie’s jobless rate was down by 2.4 percentage points (11.8 percent in November 2012).

As of November 2013, Bertie’s number of unemployed stood at 739 individuals in a workforce totaling 7,891.

Hertford County – with 740 jobless workers in a workforce of 9,497 individuals – saw an unemployment decline to 7.8 percent in November 2013 from 8.4 percent one month earlier. The county’s jobless rate was at 10 percent in November of 2012, translating into a 2.2 percent drop over a one-year period.

Northampton County’s jobless rate fell by a mere 0.1 percent (8.6% to 8.5%) from October to November 2013. However, the number of unemployed workers there (715 in a workforce of 8,461) had declined 2.0 percent from a 10.5% rate during November 2012.

Gates County’s unemployment rate fell to 5.7 percent (273 jobless individuals in a workforce totaling 4,787) in November 2013. One month prior, that figure stood at 6.0 percent. In November of 2012, Gates County saw 7.4 percent of its workforce without jobs.

November 2013 jobless rates for other northeastern North Carolina counties were: Chowan (8.2 percent; down from 8.9 percent one month earlier), Currituck (5.7 percent; an increase from 5.0 percent in October), Dare (8.4 percent; up from 7.0 percent), Halifax (10.5 percent; down from 11.2 percent), Martin (8.2 percent; down from 9.1 percent), Pasquotank (9.1 percent; down from 9.7 percent), Perquimans (7.9 percent; down from 8-9 percent), Tyrrell (8.1 percent; up from 7.6 percent), and Washington (9.3 percent, down from 9.6 percent).

Statewide, there were 322,319 individuals in a total workforce of 4,670,088 without jobs in November 2013 – an unemployment rate of 6.9 percent. That number is down from 7.5 percent in October 2013 and a 2.2 percent decrease from North Carolina’s 9.1 percent jobless rate in November 2012.