While the nation’s unemployment rate hit its highest point in five years Friday, the jobless picture in Montana remains much better, largely because of our natural-resource economy, a state economist said.

“If you look at the states that are doing well in 2008, they tend to be oil-and-gas producing states or agriculture states,” said Barb Wagner of the Department of Labor’s Research and Analysis Bureau.

Still, the unemployment rate in Montana has crept upward this year, and state officials are hoping the trend won’t worsen.

“The increase that we’ve had from last year so far has not been that much of a concern, but we’re still a little nervous,” Wagner said.

On the national level, unemployment for August hit 6.1 percent, its highest rate in five years and an increase from 5.7 percent in July and 4.7 percent a year ago. The U.S. economy also has lost 605,000 jobs this year.

August unemployment figures for Montana won’t be available for another two weeks. But the state’s unemployment rate for July stood at 4 percent, which was a slight decline from 4.1 percent the previous month.

In July 2007, the Montana unemployment rate was 3.1 percent.

While Montana’s jobless rate climbed every month this year until June, starting at 3.2 percent in January and peaking at 4.2 percent in May, the state has added 23,000 jobs, Wagner said. An apparently growing population has expanded the workforce and added jobs while the unemployment rate has risen slowly.

Montana’s economic growth rate this year is about 5.3 percent, the third best in the nation, trailing only the oil-and-gas titans Alaska and Wyoming.

Wagner said oil-and-gas and other resource industries, like agriculture, bring new money into the state. Another historic growth area for Montana has been consumer-based industries, like retail sales, driven by population growth.

However, no sectors are showing strong growth at the moment, and the “bright side” of Montana’s economy is that certain sectors that have been hammered in other states have seen only slight declines here.

For example, the construction sector has lost only about 300 jobs in Montana so far this year and real estate has lost about 100, mostly in recent months. Slumps in retail sales, triggered by less consumer spending, really haven’t shown up much in Montana yet, Wagner said.

Wage growth in Montana also has been outpacing national trends since 2005.

Montana’s unemployment rate has been consistently lower than national levels for the entire decade, usually running about 1.5 percentage points less. That’s a turnaround from the 1980s and 1990s, when the state’s economy was often worse than the national average.

Montana’s unemployment rate is the percentage of the active workforce who have lost their jobs or are without jobs and newly looking for work. The current workforce is estimated at 505,000 people, so at 4 percent the unemployed total about 20,000.

The rate is compiled by looking at unemployment claims and population surveys. It’s an estimate that has a margin of error of plus or minus 0.7 percentage points.