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Economist Christine Chmura said the recession is over, although recovery will take a while.

She said national economists haven't officially declared an end date for the recession, but "the majority of economists believe [the recession] is over as of the third quarter of 2009."

Chmura was delivering an economic forecast report for the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy in a teleconference that also included business leaders and reporters. She is the president of Richmond-based Chmura Economics and Analytics, and has done economic analyses for state government and other groups.

Chmura predicted the economy will grow at a rate of 2.5 percent to 3 percent, lower than might be expected for an economy coming out of a recession. That slowness, she said, is due to "headwinds" that are slowing growth, such as the difficulty of getting credit, especially for businesses, and continued high unemployment.

"We expect that high unemployment rate to come down only slowly over the next couple of years," she said.

Chmura said the national economy lost more than 8 million jobs in the recession, and that if 200,000 jobs are created a month--a rate she thinks is reasonable--it would still take more than three years to regain those lost jobs.

"We do have these factors that are causing the economy to grow at a modest rate, rather than the strong rebound," Chmura said.

She said Virginia's economy is doing slightly better than the national economy.

Jobs in professional business services fields grew 1.4 percent in May, and those are "very good, high-paying jobs," many of which are in Northern Virginia, Chmura said. The education and health jobs sector also has expanded.

She said she expects Virginia's job base "to show tangible improvement" by the end of the year. Chmura said salary and wages should increase in the next two years, but that consumer spending is still low in most areas of Virginia.

The Thomas Jefferson Institute asks Chmura to do an economic report every year, and regularly asks her to also do a survey on a particular policy issue. This year it is transportation.