To degree to which communities have benefited from natural resource or commodity booms from mining, has been a topic that has elicited interest from a broad-spectrum researchers. In this paper we are interested in investigating the local impact of mining activity, specifically related to gold, on several socio-economic population indicators in Colombia. By performing several statistical procedures, we find evidence that before the gold boom, the producing municipalities had life standard indicators which, on average, were similar to other municipalities that did not experience the mining boom. Our estimates suggest that the effect of the gold boom have had questionable impact on the socio-economic indicators like MPI and UBN.
