It’s not great, but it’s still probably the best growth the American economy is going to see for a while.

Economic activity picked up in the first quarter of this year, with output expanding at an annualized pace of 2.5 percent, according to a Commerce Department report released on Friday. The number was a welcome improvement from the unusually sluggish growth at the end of 2012, but significant government spending cuts and the pinch from recent tax increases look likely to keep the economy in stall speed in the months ahead.

“We just have not been able to hit escape velocity, to get us growing fast enough to make up for the ground we lost during the recession,” said Steve Blitz, director and chief economist at ITG Investment Research. He forecasts growth around 2 to 2.5 percent for the rest of the year, which is slower than the economy’s long-term average. “Government spending is clearly a negative, but the reason why it’s such a strong negative is because there’s nothing else in the private sector really driving things forward.”

Economists noted that even the decent growth in the first quarter was probably somewhat overstated, with some of the improvement caused mostly by a rebound from the bare 0.4 annual growth rate in the fourth quarter of 2012. Businesses drew down their back-room inventories at the end of last year, so they needed to replenish them at the start of 2013. But that stockroom rebalancing appears to have restored inventories to acceptable levels and probably will not drive much more business spending growth later in the year.