PROVIDENCE – An index of leading economic indicators for Rhode Island rose in May for the first time in more than two years, offering a rare piece of positive economic news for a state with an unemployment rate greater than 12 percent.

The Providence Business News/e-forecasting.com index increased 0.8 percent in May to 93.6 after a 0.5 percent decline in April. A reading of 100 is equal to the state’s economic activity in 2000.

The leading indicators index uses various published statistics to forecast the direction of the state’s economy over the next three to six months, with positive numbers signaling growth and negative numbers signaling contraction.

Rhode Island’s economy has been in recession since June 2007, according to e-forecasting’s estimates.

Maria E. Simos, president and CEO of Durham, N.H.-based e-forecasting.com, said it is too soon to know whether the positive monthly change for May signals the beginning of a long-term upward trend or was just a blip. Still, she called the May reading “a pretty positive report.”

“In general, if the month-to-month change is positive for three months in a row, that’s a really good sign that the economy has reached a turning point and that it will start turning much better,” Simos said.

However, the index was still at its lowest level in May since April 2003, back when the state was emerging from the recession caused by the bursting of the dot-com bubble.

The 93.6 reading is roughly equal to where the index stood exactly a decade ago, in the spring of 1999 – meaning the current recession has wiped out a decade of Rhode Island’s economic growth. The index reached a high of 125.5 in April 2006.

In addition, the index’s six-month growth rate for May forecast the state economy contracting by 18 percent on an annual basis. That amount is less than had been forecast over the preceding three months, but if those months are excluded it would be the worst growth rate since the index’s records begin in January 1989.

“It looks like the economy is definitely at a bottom,” Simos said. But “it’s [been] so negative that … a huge amount of recovery is necessary to get back to where we were,” she said. The six-month growth rate forecast reached a low of negative 22.9 percent in March.

Simos also said Rhode Island’s economic index was by far the worst performer among those tracked by e-forecasting.com. Even the six-month growth forecast for hard-hit Michigan, which has the highest unemployment rate in the country, bottomed out at negative 11.9 percent during the spring, more than 10 percentage points better than Rhode Island.

Three factors were responsible for the index’s May increase – month-over-month rises in new building permits (seasonally adjusted and smoothed); consumer confidence, based on the Conference Board survey; and stock prices, as measured by the S&P 500 index.

Those were partly offset by a continued decline in manufacturing exports and rising claims for unemployment benefits. Weekly manufacturing hours and national manufacturing orders also declined by small amounts.

Two other components – the interest rate spread and a barometer of state employment – posted tiny gains.