I. Summary of Social Expenditure and Social Benefit, FY 2012

2.	Social Expenditure and its international comparison

(1) Social Expenditure by policy areas Among the nine policy areas of Social Expenditure in FY 2012, Old age was the largest component (47.6%), followed by Health (32.7%), Survivors (6.0%), Family (5.5%), Incapacity- related benefits (4.4%), Other social policy areas (1.2%), Unemployment (1.2%), Active labour market programmes (0.9%), and Housing (0.5%).

Table 4. Social Expenditure by policy area Notes: 1. Figures in brackets represent the ratio to the total expenditures. 2. Refer to Appendix 2 for an explanation of each category within the social policy areas. Table 5. Social Expenditure by policy area as a percentage of GDP Figure 1. Trends of Social Expenditure by policy area in Japan (2) International Comparison of Social Expenditure Figure 2 and Table 6 show the ratio of Social Expenditure to GDP among 6 developed countries in FY 2011. These indicate that Social Expenditure in Japan is much the same with the UK, and larger than the US, but smaller than the Continent Europe, like France and Germany. Figure 2. International comparison of Social Expenditure by policy area, FY2011 Table 6. International comparison of Social Expenditure, FY 2011 Source: OECD Social Expenditure Database 2014 ed. (http://www.oecd.org/els/social/expenditure) GDP and NI data on Japan are based on the "Annual Report on the National Accounts Statistics 2014" (Cabinet Office, Government of Japan), while the data on other countries are based on the OECD National Accounts 2014 (hereafter the same). Figure 3. International comparison of Social Expenditure by policy area, FY 2011

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