The U.S. unemployment rate edged down last month, but employers slowed the robust hiring pace of the past few months.

The government's Labor Department said the jobless rate dropped one-tenth of one percentage point in March , to 8.2 percent. That is the lowest unemployment rate since January 2009, just before the U.S. faced its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

But the data released Friday indicated the rate dropped only because more unemployed workers stopped looking for work. They are not counted as part of the labor force or in the monthly jobless report.

The U.S. economy, the world's largest, added 120,000 new jobs in March. However, the new job creation was the slowest in five months, and sharply lower than any of the previous three months, when the jobs total grew by more than 200,000 each time.

In all, the American economy has added more than 850,000 jobs between December and March – the largest growth in that category in two years. The reduced hiring in March, however, seemed to underscore concerns about the economy voiced by the chief of the country's central bank, Ben Bernanke. He has said that recent employment gains will not be sustained without more consumer spending, which drives about 70 percent of the U.S. economy.

President Barack Obama's management of the economy has emerged as a key issue in the American political campaign looking toward November's presidential election. Millions of workers lost their jobs in the recession, and many lost their homes as well when they could no longer make loan payments on time.

Since World War Two, only one U.S. president running for re-election – Ronald Reagan in 1984 – has won a second four-year term with an unemployment rate above 6 percent. Mr. Obama, a Democrat, has pointed to the recent spurt of hiring as evidence that the economy is gaining strength, although not as fast as he would like.

His chief Republican opponent, former venture capitalist Mitt Romney, has sharply attacked Mr. Obama's handling of the economic recovery. Romney contends that government regulations imposed by Mr. Obama have hindered the national economy, and that his pro-business policies would create faster job growth.