Economist says committee getting may be getting closer to declaring end of recession

Sunday, September 29th 2002, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

WASHINGTON (AP) _ The head of the panel that decides the beginning and ending dates for recessions in the United States said Sunday his group may be getting closer to picking a month when the most recent recession ended _ assuming it has ended.

Stanford economist Robert Hall, chairman of the business cycle dating committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research, told an audience of business economists that it is looking like the downturn ended somewhere between last November and March of this year.

The NBER panel declared in November that America's first downturn in a decade started in March 2001 but the panel has not said when the slump ended.

For several months, the NBER has said that it was getting closer to being able to declare an end to the recession but was waiting to make sure that the country did not slip back into negative growth _ a double-dip recession _ something some analysts say is still a possibility.

Hall told a conference of the National Association for Business Economics that a lot will depend on what is shown by the September unemployment report to be released Friday.

The unemployment rate dipped to 5.7 percent in August but many economists believe that improvement will be reversed in September and the jobless rate will climb to 5.9 percent.

Hall said a poor unemployment report for September would cause ``another pause'' before his panel is ready to declare the recession over.

The NBER waited until December 1992 to declare that the 1990-91 recession had ended in March 1991.