WESTBORO, Mass. (AP) – New England’s slow recovery from the 2001 recession is expected to continue trailing the nation’s comeback over the next four years, a regional economic forecast group said Thursday.

The New England Economic Partnership said New Hampshire would be the only one of the six New England states to post faster job growth than the nation through 2009, with Connecticut and Massachusetts seeing the region’s slowest job gains during the forecast period.

The twice-yearly forecast released by the nonprofit group was roughly in line with its previous forecasts for a modest regional recovery from the national recession that hit four years ago and persisted longer in New England than it did in many other regions.

“We are following the U.S. economy in many respects,” Ross Gittell, the partnership’s forecast manager and a University of New Hampshire economist, told about 200 business leaders at a conference in Westboro. “The common theme is that growth is slower than it was in the late 1990s, but faster than it was early in this decade.”

But the regional report and forecasts for each New England state were assembled before last week’s Pentagon recommendations of military base closings and realignments. New England is expected to absorb nearly half the net jobs cut nationwide, darkening the economic outlook for hard-hit states like Maine and Connecticut.

“Our economic recovery, apart from the base closure considerations, has been a lot slower than for the nation as a whole,” said Edward J. Deak, the partnership’s Connecticut forecast manager and an economist at Fairfield University.

The group said New England’s gross regional product will grow an average of 3.1 percent per year through 2009, compared with 3.3 percent growth nationally.

The partnership, with members from private industry, government and academia, said total employment in the six New England states is not expected to return to its first quarter 2001 peak of 7.083 million jobs until the fourth quarter of 2006. That’s about a year and a half behind the expected employment recovery in the United States as a whole.

After eight consecutive quarters of declines beginning in 2001, the number of jobs in the region began to increase in the second quarter of 2003.

New Hampshire is expected to lead New England in terms of job growth through 2009 at an average of 1.6 percent per year, compared with 1.4 percent for the nation.

Employment growth in Connecticut and Massachusetts is expected to fall below 1 percent, dragging New England’s rate down to 1.1 percent.

“In all major sectors of the economy, employment growth rates in the region are expected to be below the national average,” Gittell said.

But unemployment rates in New England are expected to fall more than half a percentage point below the U.S. rate, averaging 4.4 percent regionally from 2004 through 2009. New Hampshire and Vermont are forecast to have the region’s lowest unemployment during that period, averaging 3.1 percent and 3.4 percent, respectively, with Massachusetts posting the region’s highest rate at 4.8 percent.

New England’s fastest-growing sectors are expected to include education, professional and business services, health services and leisure and hospitality, Gittell said. High-tech employment growth is expected to outpace growth for all industries as a whole, with the information sector growing at a slower rate.

AP-ES-05-19-05 1615EDT