New jobless claims last week declined from 504,000 the previous week down to only 473,000 last week. This is good news in an otherwise dreary economy.

48 expert economists who were surveyed by the Dow Jones Newswires predicted that jobless claims would only fall by about 10,000 (median of those surveyed). Instead we saw a decline of 31,000 which is three times what was expected.

The statistic refers to the applications for unemployment benefits in the U.S. It does not include those people who were already collecting unemployment. These numbers are slightly encouraging for a job market that has not had much good news lately. After last weeks news that 504,000 people had filed for unemployment the week before, a lot of analysis were not expecting much improvement. The 504,000 new claims was the highest we’ve seen since November.

There doesn’t seem to be any special underlying cause for the larger than expected drop, according to the Labor Department. It will be interesting to see what happens this week and the coming few weeks. Perhaps the job market is getting better after all.