Social Impact Investing

SOCIAL IMPACT INVESTMENT: BUILDING THE EVIDENCE BASE
across childhood as a whole, and into employment and living supports in adulthood (tax credits, minimum
income guarantees and so on).
5.38 Figure 5.8 and Table 5.4 below introduce the breakdowns of spending types by sector, as well as
trends of these breakdowns, for the G7 and Australia (covering old-age spending, health, housing, family
and (un)employment). Results clearly show that increases OECD-wide in old-age, health, and family, and
no consistent reductions elsewhere across all countries (a small drop in overall unemployment spending).
In old-age, all countries with the exception of the Germany and the United States have seen both increases
in overall spending and service spending, although in some cases this is small. The change in old age
spending is likely to reflect the increasing need for elderly long-term care (personal and household
services) as populations’ age.
Figure 5.8: In most countries old-age spending is growing, in Australia and Japan, services are increasingly
used
Notes and Source: Left-hand axis is for % of GDP, right-hand axis is for in-kind spending as a percentage of total spending. See
table 5.4.
5.39 The OECD’s social expenditure database also maps private (or non-government) social
expenditures – where finances are managed by private bodies (Adema et al, 2011) – and shows that
aggregate mandatory private and voluntary private spending by sector are highest for old age and health.
Mandatory private spending refers to ‘social support stipulated by legislation but operated through the
private sector, e.g., direct sickness payments by employers to their absent employees…’ whereas voluntary
private spending refers to monies managed through ‘privately operated programmes that involve the
redistribution of resources across households’ via collective support arrangements (see Adema et al, 2011c,
93:94 for more details).
70 © OECD 2015