The US economy needs to grow more quickly if it is to produce enough jobs to bring down the unemployment rate further, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke said today.

Mr Bernanke said the recent decline in the jobless rate, which dropped from 9.1 per cent last summer to 8.3 per cent in February, was "somewhat out of sync" with the rather modest pace of economic growth.

US gross domestic product grew 3 per cent in the fourth quarter, but is expected to have slowed to just below 2 per cent 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," Mr Bernanke told a gathering of the National Association for Business Economics.

Reuters