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Environmental, social and governance (ESG) refers to the three main areas of concern that have developed as central factors in measuring the sustainability and ethical impact of an investment in a company or business. These areas cover a broad set of concerns increasingly included in the non-financial factors that figure in the valuation of equity, real-estate, corporate, and fixed-income investments. ESG is the catch-all term for the criteria used in what has become known as socially-responsible investing. Socially responsible investing is among several related concepts and approaches that influence and, in some cases govern, how asset managers invest portfolios.〔 Lemke and Lins, ''Regulation of Investment Advisers'' §2:158 (Thomson West, 2014) 〕 == History == Throughout history, holders of financial assets have made decisions about where those assets will be placed. The decisions were based on various criteria, financial return being predominant.〔1. Coleman, James S, ''Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital'' , (American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 94, 1988)〕 However, there have always been plenty of other criteria for deciding where to place your money – from Political considerations to Heavenly Reward. There were also those whose decisions were based on ethical criteria, the Free Traders, the Quakers and the early abolitionists amongst them. A long, though not widely adopted, tradition of socially responsible work practices existed in Britain dating back to the industrial revolution of the 18th and 19th century, such figures as Robert Owen in his New Lanark Mills,〔Donnachie, Ian, ''Robert Owen. Owen of New Lanark and New Harmony'', (Tuckwell Press, 2000)〕 John Cadbury’s Quaker run factories in Birmingham, William Lever's Port Sunlight village〔Macqueen, Adam, ''The King of Sunlight : How William Lever Cleaned Up the World'', (Bantam Press, 2004)〕 had all contributed to the promotion of workers’ welfare and rights, not to mention providing ample evidence that socially responsible work practices need not be financially damaging. Titus Salt in the middle of the 19th century had even recognised the damage that his mills’ smoke and pollution were emitting and had attempted to clean up the town of Bradford, England using his family business’ dominance of manufacturing in that area.〔James, David, ''Salt, Sir Titus, first baronet (1803-1876), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'', (Oxford University Press, 2004)〕 But it was in the 1950s and 60s that the vast pension funds managed by the Trades Unions recognised the opportunity to affect the wider social environment using their capital assets〔Roberts, B.C., ''Trade Union Government and Administration in Great Britain'' (Harvard University Press, 1958)〕 - in the United States the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers invested their not inconsiderable capital in developing affordable housing projects, whilst the United Mine Workers invested in health facilities.〔Gray, Hillel, ''New Directions in the Investment and Control of Pension Funds'', (Investor Responsibility Research Center, 1983)〕 In the 1970s, the worldwide abhorrence of the apartheid regime in South Africa led to one of the most renowned examples of selective disinvestment along ethical lines. As a response to a growing call for sanctions against the regime, the Reverend Leon Sullivan, a board member of General Motors in the United States drew up a Code of Conduct in 1971 for practising business with South Africa. What became known as the Sullivan Principles attracted a great deal of attention and several reports were commissioned by the government, to examine how many US companies were investing in South African companies that were contravening the Sullivan Code. The conclusions of the reports led to a mass disinvestment by the US from many South African companies. The resulting pressure applied to the South African regime by its business community added great weight to the growing impetus for the system of apartheid to be abandoned.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=The leon H. Sullivan Foundation )〕 In the 1960s and 1970s, Milton Friedman, in direct response to the prevailing mood of philanthropy argued that social responsibility adversely affects a firm’s financial performance and that regulation and interference from "big government" will always damage the macro economy.〔Freidman, Milton and Rose, ''Free to Choose, A Personal Statement'', (Harcourt, 1980)〕 His contention that the valuation of a company or asset should be predicated almost exclusively on the pure bottom line (with the costs incurred by social responsibility being deemed non-essential), underwrote the belief prevalent for most of the 20th century. Towards the end of the century however a contrary theory began to gain ground. In 1988 James S. Coleman wrote an article in the American Journal of Sociology entitled ''Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital'', the article challenged the dominance of the concept of ‘self-interest’ in economics and introduced the concept of social capital into the measurement of value.〔9. Coleman, James S, Ibid〕 On March 24, 1989 the oil tanker the Exxon-Valdez struck a reef in the Prince William Sound, Alaska and the resulting oil spill covered of pristine coastline with of crude oil.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council )〕 The environmental cost of the disaster combined with the financial cost of the clean up (and the threat of financial penalty to Exxon) caused the industrial world to re-think their definitions of risk. In direct response to the Exxon-Valdez disaster, a group of high value North American investors combined to form the pressure group Ceres in November 1989. It applied a new form of pressure however, acting in a coalition with environmental groups, it used the leveraging power of its collective investors to encourage companies and capital markets to incorporate environmental and social challenges into their day-to-day decision-making. The Ceres coalition today represents one of the world’s strongest investment groups with over 60 institutional investors from the U.S. and Europe managing over $4 trillion in assets.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Ceres - Mobilizing Business Leadership for a Sustainable World )〕 Although the concept of selective investment was not a new one with the demand side of the investment market having a long history of those wishing to control the effects of their investments, what began to develop at the turn of the 21st century was a response from the supply-side of the equation. The investment market began to pick up on the growing need for products geared towards what was becoming known as the Responsible Investor. In 1998 John Elkington, co-founder of the business consultancy SustainAbility, published ''Cannibals with Forks: the Triple Bottom Line of 21st Century Business'' in which he identified the newly emerging cluster of non financial considerations which should be included in the factors determining a company or equity’s value. He coined the phrase the "triple bottom line", referring to the financial, environmental and social factors included in the new calculation. At the same time the strict division between the environmental sector and the financial sector began to break down. In the City of London in 2002, Chris Yates-Smith a member of the international panel chosen to oversee the technical construction, accreditation and distribution of the Organic Production Standard and founder of one if the City of London’s leading Branding Consultancies, established one of the first environmental finance research groups. The informal group of financial leaders, city lawyers and environmental stewardship NGOs became known as ''The Virtuous Circle'', its brief was to examine the nature of the correlation between environmental and social standards and financial performance. Several of the world’s big banks and investment houses began to respond to the growing interest in the ESG investment market with the provision of sell-side services, among the first were the Brazilian bank Unibanco, and Mike Tyrell’s Jupiter Fund in London which used ESG based research to provide both HSBC and Citicorp with selective investment services in 2001. In the early years of the new millennium, the major part of the investment market still accepted the historical assumption that ethically directed investments were by their nature likely to reduce financial return. Philanthropy was not known to be a highly profitable business and Friedman had provided a widely accepted academic basis for the argument that the costs of behaving in an ethically responsible manner would outweigh the benefits. However the assumptions were beginning to be fundamentally challenged. In 1998 two journalists Robert Levering and Milton Moskowitz had brought out the ''Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For'', initially a listing in the magazine ''Fortune'', then a book compiling a list of the best practicing companies in the United States with regard to corporate social responsibility and how their financial performance fared as a result. Of the three areas of concern that ESG represented, the environmental and social had received most of the public and media attention, not least because of the growing fears concerning climate change. Moskowitz brought the spotlight onto the corporate governance aspect of responsible investment. His analysis concerned how the companies were managed, what the stockholder relationships were and how the employees were treated. He argued that improving corporate governance procedures did not damage financial performance, on the contrary it maximised productivity, ensured corporate efficiency and led to the sourcing and utilising of superior management talents. In the early 2000s, the success of Moskowitz’s list and its impact on company’s ease of recruitment and brand reputation began to challenge the historical assumptions regarding the financial effect of ESG factors.〔Ballou, B., Godwin, Norman H., Toppe Shortridge, Rebecca, ''Firm Value and Employee Attitudes on Workplace Quality'', (Accounting Horizons, Vol. 17, 2003)〕 In 2011, Alex Edmans, a finance professor at Wharton, published a paper in the ''Journal of Financial Economics'' showing that the 100 Best Companies to Work For outperformed their peers in terms of stock returns by 2-3% a year over 1984-2009, and delivered earnings that systematically exceeded analyst expectations.〔(Edmans, Alex, ''Does the Stock Market Fully Value Intangibles? Employee Satisfaction and Equity Prices'', (Journal of Financial Economics Vol. 101, 2011) )〕 In 2005, however, a quantum leap was taken in the integration of ESG considerations into the mainstream investment market. The United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative commissioned a report from the international law firm Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer on the interpretation of the law with respect to investors and ESG issues. The conclusions of the report were startling. Freshfields concluded that not only was it permissible for investment companies to integrate ESG issues into investment analysis but it was arguably part of their fiduciary duty to do so.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=UNEP Finance Initiative: Innovative financing for sustainability )〕〔(Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer ''A Legal Framework for the Integration of Environmental, Social and Governance Issues into Institutional Investment: A Report Produced for the Asset management Working Group of the UNEP FI'', 2005 (PDF) )〕 In 2014, the Law Commission (England and Wales) confirmed that there was no bar on pension trustees and others from taking account of ESG factors when making investment decisions.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Law Commission )〕 Where Friedman had provided the academic support for the argument that the integration of ESG type factors into financial practice would reduce financial performance, numerous reports began to appear in the early years of the century which provided research that supported arguments to the contrary.〔Cogan Douglas, G, ''Corporate Governance and Climate Change: Making the Connexion'', (Ceres, March 2003)〕 In 2006 Oxford University’s Michael Barnett and New York University’s Robert Salomon published a highly influential study which concluded that the two sides of the argument might even be complementary – they propounded a curvilinear relationship between social responsibility and financial performance, both selective investment practices and non-selective could maximise financial performance of an investment portfolio, the only route likely to damage performance was a middle way of selective investment.〔Barnett, Michael and Salomon, Robert, ''Beyond Dichotomy: The Curvilinear Relationship between Social Responsibility and Financial Performance'', (Strategic Management Journal, Vol. 27, 2006)〕 Besides the large investment companies and banks taking an interest in matters ESG, an array of investment companies specifically dealing with responsible investment and ESG based portfolios began to spring up throughout the financial world. The development of ESG factors as considerations in investment analysis is now widely assumed by the investment industry to be all but inevitable.〔IPE European Institutional Asset Management Survey, 2009〕 The evidence supporting a nexus between performance on ESG issues and financial performance is becoming greater and the combination of fiduciary duty and a wide recognition of the necessity of the sustainability of investments in the long term has meant that environmental social and corporate governance concerns are now becoming increasingly important in the investment market.〔Aguilera, Ruth et al, ''Corporate Governance and Social Responsibility; a comparative analysis of the UK and the US'' (Corporate Governance, Blackwell, Vol. 14, 2006)〕 ESG has become less a question of philanthropy than practicality. There has been wide uncertainty and debate as to what to call the inclusion of intangible factors relating to the sustainability and ethical impact of investments. Names have ranged from the early use of buzz words such as "green" and "eco", to the wide array of possible descriptions for the types of investment analysis - "responsible investment", "socially responsible investment" (SRI), "ethical", "extra-financial", "long horizon investment" (LHI), "enhanced business", "corporate health", "non-traditional", and others. But the predominance of the term ESG has now become fairly widely accepted. A survey of 350 global investment professionals conducted by AXA Investment Managers and AQ Research in 2008, led by Dr Raj Thamotheram, director of responsible investment at AXA, concluded that although both ESG and "sustainable" were the most commonly used names for the new data integrated into mainstream investment analysis, the vast majority of professionals preferred the term ESG to describe such data. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Environmental, social and corporate governance」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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