Global child labour trends 2000 to 2004

For the first time, a credible analysis of global and regional child labour trends is possible. We regard this as a milestone in the worldwide debate on child labour and, with it, hope to mark the beginning of regular four-yearly trend assessments. The document is structured as follows. We start with a presentation of the main estimation results for 2004 and compare these to the 2000 data. This includes the analysis of trends in children’s work and the more restricted categories of child labour and hazardous work by children. As far as possible, data are broken down by age group, sex, and region. Following a presentation of the sectoral distribution of working children, Section 3 discusses the underlying definitions and statistical cut-offs applied. In Section 4 we introduce our data sources and explain the different estimation methodologies used.