An official ruling won’t come for a couple of years, but the recession likely ended this spring, a UNC Charlotte economist said Tuesday.

Even so, North Carolina’s economic recovery will be slow, with unemployment remaining in double digits the rest of this year, said John Connaughton, author of the quarterly UNC Charlotte economic forecast.

And despite positive signs this quarter, such as a boost in corporate profits and improved consumer confidence, it’s unclear what the state economy will look like when it ultimately does recover, Connaughton told about 50 people at UNC Charlotte’s uptown campus. The forecast has studied state economic conditions since 1981.

North Carolina is expected to lose 123,500 jobs this year, but about 112,000 of those losses came in the first four months of 2009, Connaughton said. “That’s the good news,” he said.

Between the slowdown in job losses and gains in other indicators, the recession likely ended in April or May, Connaughton said. The official ruling, however, will come from the National Bureau of Economic Research, a nonprofit research organization founded in 1920. The group in late November determined that the current recession began in December 2007, and Connaughton said the bureau usually doesn’t call the end of a recession until 23 months afterward.

“We won’t know for two years if we’re right” on the recession being over, Connaughton said. “They aren’t interested in being that timely. They’re interested in being accurate.”

Regardless, the recovery in the second half of this year will be very weak, according to the UNC Charlotte forecast.

“While the economic decline is over,” the report read, “the prospect for economic growth is dim.” The N.C. economy is expected to decline 1.8 percent this year before growing by 1.9 percent next year.

Another economist who tracks regional trends, Mark Vitner of Wachovia, told a separate group Tuesday that he thinks the recession will end in October, but that “it still will be a difficult economy” for several reasons.

Unemployment will remain high, especially as severance packages from layoffs expire, Vitner said at a small-business resources event sponsored by the city of Charlotte. While layoffs are abating, hiring isn’t expected to pick up significantly in the near future. Meanwhile, he said, the region’s labor force continues to grow, fed by newcomers who consider Charlotte more fertile ground for work than other cities.

Vitner also predicted that interest rates, inflation and credit card restrictions all will increase. “People will be forced to live within their means because credit will be harder to get,” he said.

That echoed one of Connaughton’s key points about the economic recovery. As long as banks keep their reserves at high levels instead of lending to people with good credit, he said, gains will be “extremely modest” in months ahead, even if the recession has ended.

“No early stages of a recovery feel like a recovery,” he said.

Staff writer Adam Bell contributed.