Hiring up; jobless rate dips

WASHINGTON – Businesses hired robustly and joblessness fell in March, according to government data released Friday, capping a quarter of healthy expansion by the U.S. economy.

Employers added 211,000 jobs to their payrolls, the Labor Department reported, as the unemployment rate dipped to 4.7 percent, from 4.8 percent in February. The data comes on the heels of similarly strong jobs reports in January and February, making for the strongest first-quarter job growth in six years.

Combined with other favorable data, the strong employment numbers suggest that businesses are expanding at a healthier pace than they have for most of the sometimes halting expansion of the past four years. Many economists now believe that gross domestic product, a measure of all the goods and services produced, grew 5 percent or more in the first quarter, compared with 1.7 percent in the fourth quarter of 2005.

The strong job growth partly reflects people displaced by Gulf Coast hurricanes last fall being rehired. And many economists think that growth will slow later this year, as the impact of Federal Reserve rate hikes takes hold and the housing market slows.

The number of manufacturing jobs declined by 5,000, continuing a long slide. Average weekly earnings of nonsupervisory workers increased by an unimpressive 0.2 percent.