3. Responsible Investment and Institutional Investors

Conceptualization of SRI has been extended to sustainable and responsible investment. In this chapter, we do not identify these two concepts strictly but use SRI as a broad concept of responsible investment that includes both categorizations.

In Japan, we contacted 78 fund management companies, including trust banks, life insurance companies, investment advisory companies, and investment trust companies between October and December 2003. The response rate was 61.5% and the total number of valid responses was 488. The German data were collected in April and June 2003, and of 66 German investment trust fund companies and pension fund management companies, 51 participated, yielding a response rate of 77.3% from 263 professional fund managers. We collected 148 responses from fund managers in the US between September 2003 and February 2004. We sent our questionnaire to the top 250 US firms ranked by worldwide assets under management and we received responses from 148 fund managers of 74 different firms; the participation rate of US firms is 29.6%.

The Social Investment Forum Japan (SIFJ) started in November 2003 as a non-profit organization to disseminate and develop SRI in Japan. The SIFJ changed its name to the Japan Sustainable Investment Forum (JSIF) in August 2013.

The Valdez Principles are 10 principles that corporations should follow for natural environment protection. They were launched after the large-scale Valdez oil tanker spill in the Gulf Mexico in 1989.

According to statistics of the Social Investment Forum Japan (2011, p. 89), among publicly offered SRI investment trusts at the end of September 2011, approximately 75% of the net assets of funds focused on trusts that use environmental standards for screening.

On April 7, 2014, a council of Financial Services Agency (Council of Experts Concerning the Japanese Version of the Stewardship Code) published Japan’s Stewardship Code.

This survey questionnaire was sent to 1462 pension plans during the period from 12 July 2007 and 24 August. There is a valid response rate of 32.5% (Research Institute for Policies on Pension & Aging 2008).