Governments of developed countries typically spend between 20 and 30 percent of GDP on social protection. The social protection expenditure will increase in these countries with population aging. Removing inefficiencies on social protection expenditure is a way to keep current social protection with fewer resources or to expand social protection using the same resources. In this dissertation, we use DEA to analyze the efficiency of the EU-15 countries’ social protection expenditure in the period 2000-2007 Results show that that there are considerable efficiency improvements to make on social protection expenditure in countries such as Portugal. Results also show that countries with higher GDP are more technically inefficient; in contrast, countries with lower GDP (such as Portugal) have higher allocative inefficiency.