[Excerpt] There is little hope that the Millennium Development Goals will be reached without a decisive global move towards introducing a national social protection floor of basic social security benefits in countries where no such scheme exists or where they have only limited coverage. Sound social security policies have to be based on facts and figures. This report provides that factual basis to support the development of national social security policies. It is the first in a series of World Social Security Reports which will also help to monitor the global progress on social security coverage and thus support the ILO’s campaign to extend coverage. It deals first with the scope, extent, levels and quality of coverage by various social security branches; it then examines the scale of countries’ investments in social security, measured by the size and structure of social security expenditure and the sources of its financing; and finally presents the nature of social security responses to the crisis as a thematic focus. The main objective of the current report is to present the knowledge available on coverage by social security in different parts of the world, and to identify existing coverage gaps.