Household surveys are conducted annually in the nine countries, with long series, thus they are quite useful and more and more used to measure the coverage of both active contributing insured and pensioners. The latest survey available is from 2018, except in a few countries which is from 2016­2017. In addition, the surveys, in theory, provide a greater coverage esti­mate, as all the insured are included, whether in private or public systems or in separate schemes. Another advantage of the surveys is that they offer socio-economic data on the coverage of the insured, for example, EAP and self-employed-workers coverage, as well as coverage by income groups(quin­tiles), location(urban and rural), education level(low, middle, and superior) and enterprise size(small, medium, and large), which allows studying dispari­ties in coverage(see Appendices 1 and 2). Nevertheless, the coverage percent­ages obtained in the surveys are different from those of the administrative figures and present several problems: methodological changes or adjust ­ments to the sample and the weighting factors, which affect comparability over time; risks of sampling and errors in surveys, their representativeness and reliability; consistency and, therefore, compatibility between countries, i.e., coverage indicators that are not exactly the same in all countries; lack of cooperation among respondents to provide correct information in a timely manner; and questions asked in a different way or errors in the responses given by respondents or when collecting and processing data(Rofman and Oliveri, 2012; ECLAC, 2018; ILO, 2020b). Surveys have improved some of these problems over time. Due to their annual publication, to series relatively stan­dardized for many years, and to socio-economic information on the insured, we use household surveys herein, except when surveys had not been con­ducted in some of the nine countries. b. Reality Contributory Coverage Here we contrast the promises of the reformers in extending the active(contrib­utory) coverage relative to the total EAP with the available statistics. Between the year the reform was implemented in each country and the year 2004, the 40