Has oil wealth been a force for income equality in Venezuela over the long term?

Abstract This paper develops a unified framework combining corrected National Accounts, dynamic social tables, and capital-income allocation to reconstruct long-run inequality, allowing the calculation of overall inequality, labor inequality, and extended-income inequality. The evidence indicates a decline in overall inequality alongside a contrasting rise in labor inequality from the late 1950s to 1970. However, oil-price shocks after 1973 had distributionally asymmetric and non-linear effects on overall inequality, whereas labor inequality exhibits a sign-dependent response. Furthermore, in-kind transfers in education and health substantially lowered overall inequality. Nevertheless, oil wealth did not function as a sustained equalizing force; post-1970s rent volatility, institutional weaknesses, and labor-market fragmentation reinforced a distributional regime in which gains concentrated at the top during booms while losses were widely shared during slumps. The Venezuelan case illustrates how reliance on publicly owned natural resources, absent strong institutions and policies, can evolve into a persistent growth and distributional failure.