REGION'S ECONOMY SLIDES BUT NOT MUCH.

Byline: Gregory J. Wilcox and Evan Pondel Staff Writers

With the nation's economy declared officially Monday to have fallen into recession, analysts said Southern California has fared somewhat better and should rebound by next summer along with the rest of the country.

A panel of academics announced Monday that the U.S. economy had slipped into recession in March. But there is no consensus on whether Southern California has or will follow suit. There is agreement, though, that the local economy went into decline months after the nation's downturn and will not be hit as hard.

``It does not appear at this point to look like a particularly deep or long-lasting recession,'' Tom K. Lieser, a senior economist at UCLA's Anderson School, said of the local economic outlook.

Lieser, who prepares the school's quarterly forecast for California, said September's third-quarter report had predicted a short recession for the state starting later this year.

Now Lieser believes that the recession started about the time California began wrestling with surging electricity prices in early summer.

A recession usually is defined as two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth.

The start of the national recession - last March - was set Monday by the Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research, the official arbiter of economic cycles.

The committee - consisting of six leading economists - based its decision, in part, on monthslong declines in industrial production, employment, real income, and wholesale-retail trade.

Locally, the only comparable figure tracks jobs - and the recent news was not good.

During October, seasonally adjusted unemployment in Los Angeles County reached 5.9 percent, its highest level in more than two years and a two-tenths of a percentage point increase from September.

California's seasonally adjusted unemployment rate was 5.7 percent in October compared with 5.4 percent in September.

This feels like a recession to Jack Kyser, chief economist for the Economic Development Corp. of Los Angeles County.

``I'd say we're already there, probably,'' Kyser said of the region's relationship to recession.

He also noted that manufacturing employment in the county is falling. By the end of October, manufacturing employment in the county was down 19,500 jobs in the past 12 months.

Ted Gibson, chief economist for the California Department of Finance, said there is not enough evidence yet to say the state has entered recessionary territory.

``The only indicator for recession in California at the moment is employment,'' he said.

The national research bureau said a substantial decline in employment was one of its key indicators of a national recession. California's unemployment rate has increased for four consecutive months and Gibson said that a six-month increase is needed to declare the state in recession.

Even so, sagging technology and manufacturing sectors have California teetering on a recessionary fault line.

Kyser and Lieser agree that the San Francisco Bay Area, caught in the cross hairs of the dot-com implosion, probably sank into recession before the nation.

``The one problem for us is that the Bay Area is in recession and it's going to be pretty nasty. A lot of people will look at that and assume all of California is in a recession,'' Kyser said.

For example, San Francisco's unemployment rate outpaced Los Angeles in October by a tenth of a percentage point, the first time in 13 years the jobless rate was greater in the Bay Area.

Kyser also takes a self-described contrarian opinion that the diversity of Los Angeles County's economy will soften the local blow.

The biggest worry in the southern part of the state is Orange County, which has the most local exposure to the tech sector collapse that could lead to a commercial real estate slump because of a high volume of industrial and office space construction, he said.

However, not all forecasters predict a recession for Southern California.

In its regional economic forecast issued at midmonth, the Southern California Association of Governments predicted that the five-county area - Los Angeles, Ventura, Riverside, San Bernardino and Orange - would not slip into recession but would grow at a slow rate.