New Answers for an Old Question: Comparable Estimates for Child Work in Post-War Europe

Abstract Children’s work is a complex decent work challenge. Despite its historical decline, around 138 million minors are still engaged in child labor worldwide today. While it is fundamental to understand how child work declined in the past, historical estimations are difficult due to inconsistent and incomparable country data sources – even for Europe during the 20 th century. To address this understudied issue, this article presents a new dataset on children’s work for post-war Europe. Building on retrospective approaches developed in the literature, it extends this methodology to European-wide data for the first time, producing new estimates of child work rates for ages 10 to 14 and 10 to 17 across 13 countries, as well as Europe as a whole, between 1950 and 1990. This data provides evidence of persistent but often overlooked patterns of children’s work in recent decades in Europe, particularly in under-researched regions such as northern and southern Europe. Child work remained significant in the first post-war decade, declined steadily between 1960 and 1980, and then slowed or stagnated by 1990, especially among older minors. This paper provides researchers with a complementary resource to study children’s work in Europe during the 20 th century. The methodology presented can be applied to alternative sources, contexts, and labor issues, extending the scope of future research on both child work and decent work.