By Lukanyo Mnyanda April 21 (Bloomberg) -- The pound strengthened against the dollar and the euro after a report showed the number of Britons claiming jobless benefits declined in March by more than economists predicted as the recovery took hold. Sterling also advanced for a third day against the yen as the MSCI World Index of stocks rose amid better-than-predicted earnings at Apple Inc. and Elpida Memory Inc., sapping demand for the Japanese currency as a refuge. Bank of England policy makers unanimously kept their bond-buying plan at 200 billion pounds ($307 billion) this month as some officials expressed concern at the prospect of a prolonged bout of faster inflation, minutes of the April 8 meeting showed today. “The macroeconomic data has systematically surprised on the upside,” said Neil Jones, head of European hedge-fund sales at Mizuho Corporate Bank Ltd. in London. “I’m positive sterling will continue to do well against the euro and the yen.” The pound gained 0.4 percent to $1.5416 as of 9:42 a.m. in London. It appreciated 0.4 percent to 87.14 pence per euro and was 0.4 percent stronger at 143.68 yen. The number of people receiving unemployment benefits in March dropped by 32,900 from a month earlier, when it declined by a revised 40,100, the Office for National Statistics said today in London. The median forecast in a Bloomberg News survey of 26 economists was for a 10,000 drop. Improved Earnings Apple said profit almost doubled in the second quarter. Elpida, Japan’s biggest maker of computer memory chips, reported its first annual profit in three years, beating analysts’ estimates. The U.K.’s St James’s Place Plc, the wealth manager majority owned by Lloyds Banking Group Plc, said first-quarter sales rose 42 percent. “Sterling should remain in demand in a risk-seeking environment,” Brian Kim, a currency strategist at UBS AG in Stamford, Connecticut, wrote in a research note yesterday. It “has proven supportive to the currency as of late,” he said. The pound has gained 2.1 percent against the dollar and climbed 3 percent against the euro in the past month as reports showed the U.K. economy is emerging from its worst recession since World War II. For the year so far, it’s down 4.8 percent against the U.S. currency, partly on investors’ concern that next month’s election will produce a government too weak to tame the biggest budget deficit among the Group of Seven nations. Election Polls An ICM Ltd. poll published on the Guardian newspaper’s Web site on April 19 showed support for the opposition Conservatives at 33 percent, compared with 28 percent for the governing Labour Party. Support for the Liberal Democrats was at 30 percent. The chances of the May 6 vote producing a so-called hung parliament are 84.8 percent, according to Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc estimates as of April 19, based on opinion-poll data. U.K. annual consumer-price growth accelerated to 3.4 percent last month, a report showed yesterday, close to the 14- month high of 3.5 percent reached in January and above the 3.1 percent median prediction of economists surveyed by Bloomberg. The Bank of England has a mandate to target inflation at 2 percent and keep it within 1 percentage point of that goal. “Given that a period of above-target inflation was in prospect at a time when monetary policy was exceptionally accommodative, this was a source of concern to some members,” the central bank minutes showed. “There was a range of views among committee members about how the balance of risks to inflation and activity had altered.”

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