📊 How much do governments spend, and what do they spend it on?
In the chart, we see total government spending broken down by purpose, such as health, education, and defense, relative to the size of the economy (as measured by GDP). This is shown for a selection of OECD countries.
How much governments spend varies quite a lot across OECD countries: in France it’s 57% of GDP, while in Chile it’s less than half that (28%).
Keep in mind that these are relative shares, not absolute amounts. GDP itself varies considerably across countries, so the same percentage can represent very different sums depending on the size of a country’s economy.
For some categories, such as social protection — which includes things like pensions, unemployment benefits, disability support, and other benefits — the difference across countries is relatively large. For example, it’s 26% in Finland compared to 7.9% in the US.
In other categories, such as public services — which include things like paying interest on government debt, the running of core government functions, and foreign aid — the share is more similar across countries.
This data comes from the OECD’s Government at a Glance dataset, which covers 47 countries. Our colleague
@parriagadap recently updated our charts with the latest release.
ALT Stacked bar chart of government spending by category (social protection, health, education, economic affairs, public services, other, defense) as a share of GDP for a selection of OECD countries, where it compares spending composition and shows totals of 28% to 57% of GDP with an OECD average of 43%. Data source: OECD (2026). License: CC BY to Our World in Data.