While all public social expenditures serve a redistributive role to some extent, only a minority part of total social spending is in fact devoted to cash benefits with a direct impact on the incomes of the non-elderly. Annex Table Al shows that, over time, almost all countries devoted declining shares of total spending to cash benefits that mostly benefit children and working-age individuals.14 On average the share of these “non-elderly” benefits declined from 26.5 percent in 1985 to 21.4 percent in 2005 (without counting early retirement benefits; the decline is somewhat smaller, but still substantial, when they are included). Despite growing overall public social expenditure, this drop is sufficiently large to translate into a significant reduction of “non-elderly” benefit expenditure relative to GDP on average (from 4.9 to 4.5 percent across 29 countries, upper panel of Figure 4).15 Between the mid-80s and the mid-90s, however, sizable reductions were only observed in a few countries (Belgium, France, Ireland, Netherlands) while the majority of countries recorded increases.