ATHENS, Greece — GREECE was yesterday discussing ways of kick-starting the country’s depressed economy with European officials.

Among the measures being pored over in meetings between Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos and the European Commission’s task force chief for Greece and the regional policy commissioner was how to unlock capital in public investments.

Venizelos’ meetings with task force head Horst Reichenbach and commissioner Johannes Hahn came a day after he began talks with officials from the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund, dubbed the ‘troika,’ on details of the country’s second international rescue package.

Hahn and Reichenbach’s visit focused on public investment and structural programmes, Venizelos said, adding he aimed “to unite these in a common approach that gives hope and prospects, because the great problem of the Greek economy is disappointment. The great need, if you like, that we have as a nation is to see that there is a future ahead of us, that there are prospects”.

Venizelos said Monday that the government would have to cut spending further next year, but would not impose new taxes.

“Greece is forced, due to its fiscal situation, to make a super-human effort, an effort full of sacrifices, to achieve the drastic reduction of its budget deficit and avoid the increase of public debt while we have, for a fourth year, a continued recession and while unemployment is increasing,” Venizelos said. Unemployment stood at 17.5 per cent in September.

Greece is negotiating the details of a second, ¤130-billion ($14.6-trillion) rescue loan deal agreed on in October and which includes provisions to write off about 50 per cent of the value of Greek bonds held by private creditors. Negotiations on the details of that deal, which could see Greece’s debt reduced by ¤100 billion, are expected to extend for several weeks into the new year.

Greece received a first, ¤110-billion bailout in May 2010, and imposed a series of austerity measures including salary and pension cuts and several rounds of tax increases in return.

The first rescue loan package from Greece’s European partners and the IMF came after years of government overspending and data falsification provoked credit downgrades that made it too expensive for Greece to borrow.

But the measures proved insufficient, with the government struggling to implement many of them, and it soon became clear that a second bailout was needed to prevent the country from defaulting on its debt in a crisis that has threatened the European Union’s joint currency, the euro.

Greece’s budget deficit has continued to widen, with a deep recession counteracting any extra revenue the country has managed to raise, figures released yesterday show.

The central government’s deficit from January to November this year widened by 5.1 per cent compared to the same period in 2010, reaching ¤20.5 billion from ¤19.5 billion last year, finance ministry preliminary figures showed.

“The revenue shortfall can be mainly attributed to the deeper recession than that projected when the 2011 Budget was prepared,” the ministry said in a statement.

Eurostat, the EU’s statistics office uses a different set of figures when assessing Greece.

Separately, Greece raised (euro) 1.625 billion in the sale of 26-week treasury bills at a yield of 4.95 per cent, slightly higher than the 4.89 per cent interest rate from a similar sale last month, the country’s public debt management agency said.

The sale was 2.93 times oversubscribed, roughly the same demand as last time. The proceeds were also higher than anticipated — Greece had been seeking to raise ¤1.25 billion.