The 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 on Monday.

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

U.S. gross domestic product grew 3 percent in the fourth quarter, but is expected to have slowed to just below 2 percent 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.

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