This document focuses on two issues related with the evolution of the labor market in Colombia that constitute major challenges for Colombia’s future process of development. The first issue consists in the persistence of high income inequality. Three sources of regressive variation in labour income inequality are compared recurring to microsimulations: 1) the reallocation of workforce across industries and the evolution of sector-specific wage premia; 2) the evolution of informality size and of the rate of return to informal work; 3) and the evolution of the rate of return to education towards a more convex distribution. The results derived from the microsimulations point out that the evolution of the sector-specific wage premia and of the rate of return to informal work contributed to a higher labour income inequality. On the contrary, the change of the rate of return to education over the years had a smoothing effect on the distribution of labour income despite a process of convexification. The second issue addressed in this document deals with the role of the increasing trade integration on the structural change in Colombia, the main interest of which lies in its implications for the aggregated productivity. Because of the multiplicity of channels by which greater trade integration may affect structural change in an economy, an empirical approach is adopted to estimate the effect of the former on the latter, based on the Colombian household survey for the main cities between 1986 and 2006. The results show that the variations in the indicator of trade integration induced a net flow of workers towards less productive sectors and the inclusion of the informal sector did not change the conclusion according which the greater insertion of Colombian economy into the international trade produced a structural change whose effect on productivity was negative.