Unemployment rate declines to 10.2 percent, but experts point to 'discouraging' pace of recovery

The U.S. unemployment rate declined to 10.2 percent in July, as the economy added 1.8 million jobs, the Labor Department said on Friday.

This came after the June jobs report last month showed the unemployment rate declined to 11.1 percent, with 4.8 million jobs added. The July report surpassed expectations, as experts were anticipating about 1.48 million jobs would be added and that the unemployment rate would decline to about 10.6 percent, CNBC reports.

But the unemployment rate is still higher than during the Great Recession, and experts raised concerns about the recovery's slowing pace.

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"The economy is still in a massive hole, but we're crawling back out," University of Michigan economics professor Justin Wolfers tweeted. "The problem is that the pace of improvement has slowed to a crawl." MacroPolicy Perspectives economist Julia Coronado similarly told The Wall Street Journal, "The pace of recovery has really been set back by the resurgence of the virus. Given how far we have to go to re-employ the people who have become unemployed, that's very discouraging."

The Washington Post's Heather Long, noting that the U.S. has recovered about 43 percent of the jobs that were lost during the coronavirus crisis, additionally wrote, "There's still a lot of people hurting and a long way to go until we're back to 'normal.'"