Together with the “demographic programme” introduced in 2006, with its focus on increasing birth-rates and improving health status of the working-age population (Chapter 4 and OECD, 2011b), these reforms constitute the most important social policy re-orientations in recent years, and are discussed in more detail below. However, economic growth has been relatively strong since then and throughout the 2000s, public social spending including housing and health, has been just below 15% of GDP (Figure 3.6). Since the mid-2000s, the spending to GDP ratio increased to 15% of GDP because over the 2005-08 period: i) the “monetisation” reform increased cash transfers by about 1 percentage point of GDP, ii) there was an increase of about 1% of GDP in public housing support in 2007, and in) public expenditure on health grew by half a percentage point of GDP from 2005 to 2008 (Box 3.4). Pension reform (Chapter 4) contributed to a rise in this public social spending-to-GDP-ratio to around 17% in 2009.