WASHINGTON, Nov 24: A committee that designates the official dates of recessions in the United States debated on Friday whether the world’s largest economy has slid into one, but their determination will not be known until at least next week.

We are going to have a conference call which is not such an unusual event and if we decide on a beginning date for the recession, then there will still not be an official announcement (immediately), Martin Feldstein, President of the Bureau of Economic Research and a professor of economics at Harvard University, told Reuters.

The NBER is the nation’s official arbiter of recessions.

Another member of the six-person NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee, who declined to be identified, confirmed later on Friday the call had taken place but said there would be no announcement on its outcome until at least next week.

If the members did make a ruling during the conference call, the bureau will issue a revised version of a memo it has been posting on its website each month as the US economy which began a sharp deceleration late last year and which suffered yet another blow from the Sept. 11, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon has slowed.

Feldstein said the call would constitute an official meeting of the Business Cycle Dating Committee only if its members do decide they have enough grounds to call such a contraction.

A vast majority of private economists think the country has tumbled into recession, particularly after the Sept. 11, blow which brought economic activity to a near-standstill for days.

In the third quarter, the US economy contracted 0.4 per cent the first time gross domestic product has shrunk since 1993 and the steepest fall since 1991.

October retail sales, which saw a record jump as consumers seduced by interest-free loans from automakers poured into car dealerships, have sparked some optimism that any downturn will be short and relatively painless.

However, economists believe that the economy is likely to take until at least early 2002 to stage a recovery.

Bush administration officials are pushing to get a stimulus package through Congress which could be worth as much as $100 billion but partisan bickering has stalled efforts.

Although the loose definition of a recession is two quarters of economic contraction, the Cambridge, Mass.-based NBER uses a complex set of criteria to call a recession a recession.

A recession involves a substantial decline in output and employment. In the average recession, industrial production fell by 4.6 per cent and employment by 1.1 per cent, the NBER says in its description of how it calls a recession.

Earlier this month, the bureau said that three of the four indicators it combs through were at levels consistent with a recession.

Among the four indicators, only income has behaved differently from recession averages over the past seven months, the NBER said in a memo dated Nov. 9.

In September, the last month for which the data are available, personal income in the United States was unchanged after a rise of 0.1 per cent in August. Personal spending fell 1.8 per cent after rising 0.3 per cent in August.

At the time of that last memo revision, the NBER said it had not yet held a meeting to determine if a recession had begun, but that indicators of industrial production, employment and wholesale-retail trade were within recession territory.

Feldstein said the committee’s members have been having an awful lot of communication by email in recent weeks. He added that Friday, the day after the Thanksgiving holiday, made it easy to convene a conference call because committee members were at home rather than teaching or in meetings.

According to brokerage Salomon Smith Barney, since 1980 the NBER has announced recession dates no earlier than the middle of a downturn.

The bureau says in its website memo that it does not call the beginning or end of a recession until it has at least six months of data from the peak date of the economy, and often needs even more numbers to make a ruling.

It took until April 1991, when the last recession was actually finished, for the NBER to say the peak date — and the start of the recession — was July 1990. It did not declare the date of March 1991 the downturn’s end until December 1992.

A report in the Wall Street Journal on Friday said the committee was expected to decide the record US expansion gave way to recession in March. The report cited panel member Robert Gordon, an economics professor at Northwestern University.

Gordon was not immediately available for comment.—Reuters