It’s worse than he thought.

This time last year, Charles Colgan forecast that Maine would reclaim the thousands of jobs lost since the start of the recession by mid-2014.

Using phrases such as “more distress lies ahead,” Colgan updated his forecast to a recovery by mid-2017 — three years later — in a report for Friday’s New England Economic Partnership conference at the University of New Hampshire Manchester.

“That’s what the world has produced,” he said Thursday.

Colgan is NEEP’s Maine forecast manager and a professor of public policy and management at the University of Southern Maine’s Muskie School of Public Service.

“There are still some positive signs, but everything now depends on a whole bunch of policymakers getting it right,” he said. “There’s no room for error anymore.”

Before the start of the recession in 2008, Maine counted 620,000 jobs. That bottomed out at 590,000 last year and has since bounced around. Colgan predicts 592,000 jobs in 2013, and a climb back to 620,000 by 2017.

Over the next few years, manufacturing employment is forecast as flat; retail, construction and government as seeing more loses; and health care as adding new positions at half the rate it has grown over the past decade.

Leisure and hospitality work is seen as “accelerating noticeably” in 2014 as tourism and restaurant business pick up, he said.

Reports show New England as a whole isn’t faring well.

“The regional economic outlook is dominated by the global economic outlook,” said UNH Professor Ross Gittell, NEEP’s vice president and New England forecast manager, who sees growth picking up in earnest in 2013.

“We’ve been saying, ‘(Recovery) is going to happen in a year, year and a half’ for a year, year and a half,” Gittell said. “Some key issues in the global economy haven’t been worked out yet that we expect to be worked out, like the European debt situation, like the (federal) deficit, the foreclosure problems with the housing market.”

Politicians in Washington, D.C., aren’t helping consumer confidence, Colgan said.

“If people could look to the political leadership and leadership were united around a direction and, at least in broad measure, a set of actions to be taken and then you had the usual squabbling about the details, I think people would feel a lot better about the economy,” he said. “That’s not what they see. They see people literally at war with one another over the fundamental nature of the country.”

Gittell’s look around the region:

* Vermont is doing relatively well with computer-maker IBM hiring and a post-Tropical Storm Irene construction boost.

* Massachusetts has been benefiting from the strength and growth in the high-tech sector, in exports, particularly globally. But with European troubles, that becomes a concern.

* Connecticut is suffering from its proximity to the financial sector in New York.

* New Hampshire has a diverse economy and is benefiting from the high-tech sector, also from professional and business services. But, he said, like Maine, housing recovery is slow and growth in health care can’t be counted on to be so robust in the future.

* Rhode Island still suffers in terms of having the weakest economy and suffering the most during the recession.

“Of course, we all like to be more optimistic, but we’re dealing with what economic modeling forecasts are telling us,” Gittell said.

Maine state economist Amanda Rector said that when the Consensus Economic Forecasting Commission released its latest report Nov. 1, it also pushed the economic recovery date back. That group projects 615,000 jobs by 2015, which is as far into the future as that forecast goes.

“It is important to keep in mind we will eventually get back up to those employment levels; we will see growth again in the future,” Rector said. “At this point, it’s really just a matter of letting all this uncertainty settle down and see how Europe shakes out and go from there.”

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