Administration Expects Economy To Grow Steadily in Second Half
The Clinton administration projected yesterday that the economy will grow at a steady pace for the rest of the year with unemployment falling and inflation holding steady.</br></br>"The future looks good," Laura D'Andrea Tyson, chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, told reporters at the White House yesterday. The forecast portrays "a broad-based economic expansion ... while inflation remains subdued," she said.</br></br>The administration's mid-year economic forecast predicts that the economy will grow 3 percent in the last three months of this year, compared with the same period in 1993, and that inflation during the same period will be stable at 3 percent.</br></br>Yesterday's report, an update of the administration's January predictions, took into account changing employment and interest rate data but did not contain much that is new or surprising, analysts said.</br></br>"Basically, the forecast is very much as it was before," Robert Dederick, chief economist for Northern Trust Corp. in Chicago, said in a telephone interview yesterday. The latest forecast "says that the economy is going to scale down its growth to a sustainable level, and not much inflation is going to be generated," so that the Federal Reserve will not have to raise interest rates much, he said.