"This economic judge would actually give it a 10 –- 10 out of 10," says Dr. Walden, a specialist with the North Carolina Cooperative Extension Service. "We’ve created almost 15,000 net new jobs in the last month. That is a very robust level. We’ve created in North Carolina over 100,000 net new jobs in the past year.

"And even though manufacturing jobs were up in the past month, however, they were down for the entire year," he adds.

"The unemployment rate over the past year has dropped over one-half percentage point. So we certainly can hope to do better in the future -- get the unemployment rate down even more, creating more jobs.

"But this is a very positive picture for the North Carolina job market," he concludes."