Washington - The US economy needs to grow more quickly if it
is to produce enough jobs to bring down the unemployment rate further, Federal
Reserve chairperson Ben Bernanke said on Monday.
Bernanke said the recent decline in jobless rate, which
dropped from 9.1% last summer to 8.3% in February, was “somewhat out of sync”
with the rather modest pace of economic growth.
US gross domestic product grew 3% in the fourth quarter, but
is expected to have slowed to just below 2% in the first three months of this
year.
“Further significant improvements in unemployment will
likely require faster economic growth than we experienced during the past
year,” Bernanke told a gathering of the National Association for Business
Economics.