U.S. weekly jobless claims rise to 719,000 after dropping to one-year low

WASHINGTON, April 1 (Xinhua) -- Initial jobless claims in the United States rose to 719,000 last week, after dropping to the lowest level since the COVID-19 pandemic, the Labor Department reported on Thursday.

In the week ending March 27, the number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits increased by 61,000 from the previous week's downwardly revised level of 658,000, according to a report released by the department's Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

The latest report also showed that the number of people continuing to collect regular state unemployment benefits in the week ending March 20 decreased by 46,000 to reach 3.79 million.

Meanwhile, the total number of people claiming benefits in all programs -- state and federal combined -- for the week ending March 13 decreased by 1.5 million to 18.2 million, as the country continues to grapple with the fallout of the pandemic.

Last spring, as COVID-19 shutdowns rippled through the workforce, initial jobless claims spiked by 3 million to reach a record 3.3 million in the week ending March 21, 2020, and then doubled to reach a record 6.87 million in the week ending March 28.

After that, the number, though at record highs, has been declining overall, but the trend was reversed multiple times since mid-July amid COVID-19 resurgence.

According to the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE)'s semiannual Global Economic Prospects released Thursday, U.S. unemployment will decline to 5.0 percent by yearend and 4.4 percent by the end of 2022.

The outlook by PIIE Senior Fellow Karen Dynan, a former chief economist at the Treasury Department, projects U.S. GDP to grow by more than 6 percent this year, owing in part to its aggressive fiscal policy response.

Private companies in the United States added 517,000 jobs in March, indicating continued labor market recovery, payroll data company Automatic Data Processing (ADP) reported Wednesday.

Ryan Sweet, a senior director at Moody's Analytics, wrote in an analysis that the March data is "a marked improvement" from recent months and the strongest gain since September, while noting that there remains a "sizable hole" to fill in the labor market.

The jobless claims report came one day before the crucial monthly employment report released by the BLS, which will include employment data from both the private sector and the government.