The U.S. economy is expected to grow by 2.5 percent in 2013, improving to 3.5 percent growth in 2014, top Fed official Charles Evans said on Monday.
Evans also forecast the U.S. unemployment rate would be 7.4 percent this year, easing to about 7 percent in 2014.
"One good indicator of labor market improvement would be if we saw payroll employment increase by 200,000 each month for a number of months. We've been averaging about 150,000, but it's been very uneven ... we need a higher pace of employment growth and less volatility in that pace," Chicago Fed President Evans said.
The creation of 1 million jobs over six months would be a "substantive" improvement, but bringing unemployment down to the key level of 6.5 percent was likely to take much longer, probably until mid-2015, he said, speaking at the Asian Financial Forum in Hong Kong.
The U.S. Federal Reserve's decision last year to tie monetary policy to specific economic conditions should help boost the recovery without letting inflation take hold, said Evans, a chief architect of the policy.