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.