Figures released last week by Brussels show that in 2003 Portugals spend on social security, health care, pension and child benefit payments rose by just over half of one per cent compared to the previous year.

According to the EUs official statistics agency, Eurostat, 24.3 per cent of Portugals gross domestic product ( GDP ) output was used to fund social protection schemes in 2003 a 0.6 per cent increase over the 2002 spend and 3.0 per cent more than in 1994 when records were first collated.

As a percentage spend of the countrys GDP , Portugal finished in twelfth place for the amount of government funding that was made available for social protection schemes by the old-15 member states during 2003.

Ireland finished bottom of the league table, spending 16.5 per cent of its GDP on social protection schemes with Spain on 19.7 per cent and Luxembourg on 23.8 per cent.

Sweden topped the league by handing over 33.5 per cent of its GDP output to its citizens in care benefits while France finished in second position on 30.9 per cent.

The author of the report, Alexandra Petrsov, said that old age pensions accounted for the major share of total benefits paid out by Portugal in 2003 a similar situation was reflected across the other old-14 EU member states. She added that the main form of benefit expenditure is made in cash payments.

In 2003 the average social protection expenditure as a percentage of GDP within the old-15 member states was 28.0 per cent compared to 23.8 per cent in the United States.

Prior to their accession to the EU in 2004, the 10 mainly former communist eastern European nations spent on average only 13.8 per cent of their GDP on social protection schemes the lowest spend being in Estonia and Latvia with 13.4 per cent. But a recent Eurostat study, due for publication in February 2007, shows a positive trend in the increase of social protection funding in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland during 2004.

Another trend identified by Eurostat is the increase in unemployment and social exclusion benefits being paid by EU member states. According to the EUs statistics agency, Portugal and Italy paid out four per cent more to these two categories during 2003 than was spent in the previous year.