国际英语新闻：U.S. faces daunting economic, budgetary challenges: CBO chief

WASHINGTON, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- Although the U.S. economy has struggled to recover from the recent recession, the nation still faces daunting economic and budgetary challenges, Douglas Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), said here on Thursday.

During this round of recovery, the pace of growth in the nation 's output has been "anemic compared with that during most other recoveries" since World War II, and the unemployment rate has remained quite high, Elmendorf said in a testimony before the Committee on the Budget of the U.S. House of Representatives.

"For the federal government, the sharply lower revenues and elevated spending deriving from the financial turmoil and severe drop in economic activity, combined with the costs of various policies implemented in response to those conditions and an imbalance between revenues and spending that predated the recession, have caused budget deficits to surge in the past two years," said the chief of the nonpartisan CBO.

The United States reported a nearly 1.3 trillion U.S. dollars federal budget deficit in the 2010 fiscal year ending on Sept. 30, 2010. It is improving from the 1.42 trillion dollars budget gap in the 2009 fiscal year, but the deficit is nearly three times as large as the 2008 fiscal year level.

Elmendorf reiterated the CBO's forecast that for the 2011 fiscal year, if current laws remain unchanged, the federal budget deficit will rise to an even alarming figure of nearly 1.5 trillion dollars, or 9.8 percent of the nation's gross domestic product (GDP).