Much attention has been paid in recent months to Maine’s falling unemployment rate. From a peak of 8.3 percent in June 2009, our jobless rate has fallen in an ever-steeper slope to 4.0 percent in December 2015 – even lower than the pre-Great Recession low of 4.4 percent in April 2006. An accompanying fact that hasn’t received nearly the same attention is that our continuously falling unemployment rate has not meant an equivalently rising trend in employment.

From a pre-recession high of 672,035 in December 2006, employment in Maine dropped precipitously to a low of 636,537 in December 2009, a loss of over 35,000 jobs. The talk in those days was about how long it would take to regain those lost jobs, to climb back up to the pre-recession peak. Optimists said two or three years; pessimists said five or six years.

Both were wrong. Maine employment peaked in September 2013 at 662,840. We regained just over 26,000 of those 35,000 “lost jobs.”

But by December 2015, instead of continuing its path to “full recovery,” total employment in Maine fell to 646,970. Instead of gaining back more of the jobs lost in the Great Recession, we lost nearly 16,000 more.

The reason for this apparent anomaly is the complex interplay of an aging population and a combination of somewhat perplexing changes in our labor force participation rates. At the recessionary trough of December 2009, Maine’s participation rate – the share of our non-institutionalized population over age 16 with a job or looking for a job – stood at 65.1 percent, just above the national rate of 64.6 percent. Over our “job recovery” period of 2010 to 2013, Maine’s participation rate rose steadily, reaching a peak of 65.3 percent in July 2013. Over this same period, in contrast, the national participation rate fell steadily to 63.3 percent.

The reason for this change in Maine was almost entirely attributable to the higher participation rate of older workers. Between 2009 and 2013, the participation rate of Maine workers aged 55 to 64 jumped from 66 percent to 69 percent, and the participation rate of workers 65-plus jumped from 17 percent to 21 percent.

In short, Maine’s employment – and thus overall economic recovery – consisted of older workers staying in the labor market, and new entrants to the labor market and the unemployed making up whatever gap remained to fill the 26,000 jobs we “recovered.”

Since that summer 2013 peak, however, Maine’s participation rate has plummeted, falling to 61.7 percent in December 2015 – now well below the national rate of 62.6 percent. This is because our demographic imbalance has become unsustainable. Since 2013, the participation rate of those age 55-plus has stabilized. It remains well above historical averages, but eventually older workers retire or die. And, in a puzzling trend that deserves much more detailed examination, the participation rates of all age groups from age 16 to age 44 have declined in Maine between 2013 and 2015.

At the beginning of the recovery in 2009, 31 percent of Maine’s labor force was in the 16 to 34 age cohort, 47 percent was in the 35 to 54 age cohort, and 23 percent was in the 55-plus age cohort.

By 2015, the share in the youngest age cohort had fallen from 31 percent to 21 percent and the share in the middle age cohort had fallen from 47 percent to 41 percent. Only the share in the 55-plus age cohort had increased, rising from 23 percent to 29 percent of the total labor force.

The important takeaway from this analysis is not that Maine has reached full employment (that is a true but essentially meaningless fact), but that Maine is losing employment – 16,000 jobs over the past two years. If Maine is to recover from a major recession and attain economic sustainability, we must grow employment. But to do that, we must create both jobs and the people to fill them.

We must not merely improve the education and training we provide to our young people, but provide vastly improved pathways to become aware of, explore, enter into and grow in the labor force.

At the same time, we must attract to the state new people of all ages and backgrounds and welcome them into those same career paths.

Yes, Maine is at full-employment, but it is clearly not a destination we can afford to settle for.

Charles Lawton is chief economist for Planning Decisions, Inc. He can be reached at:

clawton@planningdecisions.com