Companies continued to expand headcounts in January with revisions to previous months showing even bigger gains as the US job market made further strides forward.

Payrolls increased by 157,000 workers following a revised 196,000 gain in the month before and a 247,000 jump in November, United States' Labor Department figures showed on Saturday. Revisions added 127,000 jobs to the tally in the last two months of 2012. A separate survey of households showed the unemployment rate unexpectedly rose to 7.9 percent from 7.8 percent.

Brighter employment prospects, which will help lessen the pain for consumers of a higher payroll tax, sent the Dow Jones Industrial Average above 14,000 for the first time since 2007. At the same time, a jobless rate that Federal Reserve policy makers have said remains too high means the central bank is likely to keep pumping money into financial markets.

"The economy continues to turn over and create jobs on a long, steady path," said Kevin Logan, chief US economist at HSBC Securities USA Inc in New York.

"If the unemployment rate weren't so high, growth might seem satisfactory because it's slow and steady, but we're still several millions jobs short of where we were when the recession started. The Fed would like to see things accelerate, probably closer to 220,000 jobs a month, which would be a sign of more substantial improvement," Logan said.

The US has recovered 5.51 million of the 8.74 million jobs that were lost as a result of the recession that began in December 2007 and ended in June 2009.

The Labor Department also issued its annual benchmark update, which aligned employment data spanning April 2011 to March 2012 with corporate tax records. The revision showed payrolls grew by an additional 424,000 workers, on an unadjusted basis, in that period.

Combined with the updates for November and December, the revisions put payroll employment at the end of 2012 at 134.7 million workers, 647,000 higher than previously estimated.

The figures were "an encouraging sign for the US economy," Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis President James Bullard said in an interview in Washington. Payroll gains averaging about 200,000 jobs over the past three months are "impressive" and support his forecast that economic growth will accelerate to about 3 percent this year, he said.

That job growth at the end of 2012 was stronger than first estimated also showed the economy wasn't as weak as suggested by recent figures on the nation's gross domestic product. GDP unexpectedly fell at a 0.1 percent annual rate in the fourth quarter, the worst reading since the recession ended in 2009, according to Commerce Department data out earlier this week.

The median forecast of 90 economists surveyed by Bloomberg projected payrolls would climb 165,000 in January. Projections ranged from increases of 115,000 to 230,000 after an initially reported 155,000 gain in December.

The unemployment rate was forecast to hold at 7.8 percent in January, according to the Bloomberg survey median. Estimates ranged from 7.6 percent to 7.9 percent.

(China Daily 02/04/2013 page14)