However, almost all countries devoted declining shares of total spending to cash benefits that mostly benefit children and working-age individuals.6 On average the share of these “non-elderly” benefits declined from 26.5% in 1985 to 21.4% in 2005.7 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% across 29 countries). Between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s, however, sizable reductions were only observed in a few countries (Belgium, France, Ireland, Netherlands) while the majority of countries recorded increases. Most of the drop in “non-elderly” benefit expenditures thus occurred since the mid-1990s, when most OECD countries recovered from an economic downturn, and spending on cyclical income-support measures was high (and GDP low) as a result.