ESG Special Reports – Page 37
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Special Report
BGI looks at SRI
Barclays Global Investors, one of the world’s largest investment managers, is considering introducing an SRI component into its management approach. Matthew Annable, CIO for active equity strategies in Europe, says the group is investigating whether there is a link between socially responsible companies and outperformance. As such it is in ...
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Special Report
Dispelling the mysteries
‘For many beneficiaries and the public at large, pension funds are most mysterious organisations.” Whether or not you agree with this conclusion by an academic, it is certainly true that the structure and the running of pension plans has attracted low attention in the past, even by many insiders. However, ...
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Special Report
A question of competency
“Capabilities are really high, skills and competencies are quite good.” This is the outcome of an independently commissioned survey by consultants Watson Wyatt into decision-making and pension fund governance in the UK. As Professor Andrew Kakabadse from the Cranfield School of Management, who led the research, told those attending a ...
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Special Report
Exploiting the correlation
Compelling evidence is emerging that strong financial performance and sound financial management are increasingly linked. Much has been written over the past few years about the presence or absence of a relationship between the environmental and financial performance of companies. On balance, most evidence suggests that a positive relationship does ...
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Special Report
Added impetus for SRI?
The UK government has announced in its response to the consultation on principles of operation for UK pension schemes proposed by Paul Myners that it will legislate to incorporate the US ERISA principles on shareholder activism into UK law. This would make it a duty for fund managers and pension ...
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Special Report
Does institutional activism work?
The American Society of Corporate Secretaries has the motto ‘promoting excellence in corporate governance’. But this organisation has no monopoly on this laudable objective. You might well think these days that almost every other organisation in the investment industry has adopted this motto but have we gone too far. In ...
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Special Report
SRI: not high on agenda
Rather like the road to hell, the road to outperformance appears to be paved with good intentions. If the experience of socially responsible investment (SRI) in the UK is anything to go by, though, then those intentions appear somewhat half-hearted. SRI in its purest form was the exclusion of offensive ...
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Special Report
SRI is here to stay
Since July 3 last year UK pension funds have been required to state their policy on ethical investment. Three years ago, when this policy initiative was first announced by the then pensions minister, John Denham, there were very low expectations for change. Industry figures were predicting that the vast majority ...