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Este trabajo busca aportar evidencia empírica sobre la relación entre flujos de capital, explotación de recursos naturales y desindustrialización, a partir del análisis del caso colombiano. Para ello, se concentra en indagar si el financiamiento externo percibido por el país durante el período de estudio generó un proceso de apreciación adicional de la tasa de cambio real fortaleciendo un posible fenómeno de «enfermedad holandesa» originado en el aumento de los precios de los commodities. Los resultados muestran que la entrada de capitales, sobre todo la entrada de inversión extranjera directa al sector minero-energético, efectivamente ocasionaron una apreciación de la tasa de cambio que afectó negativamente el desempeño de los sectores transables en general y de la manufactura en particular. Esto demuestra que no solo la explotación de los recursos naturales sino, además, la forma en que esta se financie influyen en el comportamiento de la industria en las economías de los países en desarrollo.

Income inequality and house prices have risen sharply in developed countries during 1975–2010. In line with theoretical models, we argue that this co-movement is no coincidence, but that inequality has driven up house prices on the grounds that it raises the aggregate demand for housing. Our results suggest that absolute inequality and house prices in most Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries were positively correlated and cointegrated, whereas relative inequality and mean income were not significant long-run determinants. This finding indicates that the surge in OECD house prices in part can be explained by a top-income-induced increase in housing demand, and that it is important to consider the interaction of rising mean income and its relative distribution when studying potential correlates of house prices. Moreover, our results confirm previous findings that the short-term real interest rate also is an important correlate of house prices.

Economic crime models and the social strain theory argue that income inequality can foster property crime, yet empirical studies do not provide strong support for this relationship across countries. An important limitation of these studies is that they only consider relative inequality measures and omit absolute ones. Absolute inequality can have a crime-inducing effect for two main reasons: First, the potential monetary returns from crime can be expected to depend on the interaction between relative income inequality and mean income. Second, higher levels of absolute inequality imply that the economic elite can capture institutions in ways that can make them dysfunctional for society as a whole. This article finds that, in contrast to relative inequality, absolute inequality is a robust and statistically significant determinant of violent property crime rates for a sample of up to 59 developed and developing countries.

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