Among the 11 countries considered, there is a group in which social spending largely exceeds non-social spending. Most countries are enjoying greater fiscal space derived from reduced spending on debt servicing (interest payments), which means that they have more room to fund social programmes (see figures II.7 and II.8). There is an overlap between the statistics of the functional classification of expenditure for the current period and those relating to the period when the assets were acquired. Consequently, the Manual on Government Finance Statistics 2001 (IMF.