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France's Financial (Eco) System highlights experience from France in improving the integration of sustainability issues into financial decision-making.
A key area of focus has been on improving information and market analysis. Environmental, social and governance (ESG) reporting requirements were first introduced in the New Economics Regulation law of 2001, and strengthened by the 2010 ‘Grenelle II’ law and 2015 the Law on Energy Transition for Green Growth (EETG).
France has also practised direct public interventions to mobilize capital and enable new markets and expertise to develop. Public financial institutions such as the Caisse des Dépôts and Bpifrance are able to leverage regulated savings accounts and other sources of capital to provide financing in line with sustainability mandates. They committed to mobilising €15 billion towards low-carbon transition by 2017. French institutions have also played a leading role in the development of the green bonds market.
Effects of Financial System Size and Structure on the Real Economy: What do we know and what do we not know? provides an overview of the findings in the empirical economics and finance literature on the effects that various financial system characteristics have on real economic outcomes. Although the empirical evidence on various relationships is mixed, there appears to be relatively robust empirical evidence that: financial deepening promotes economic development only up to a certain size of financial systems relative to GDP and that ‘too much finance’ may actually harm economies; that smaller banks tend to have more stable lender-borrower relationships than large banks and that smaller banking institutions extend more credit to SMEs; that market-based banking provides less financing to the real economy than traditional banking while being more prone to financial crisis; and that more concentrated banking markets are less cost efficient.
Scaling Up Green Bond Markets for Sustainable Development: A strategic guide for the public sector to stimulate private sector market development for green bonds argues that with the right support in place USD 1 trillion of green bonds could be issued a year by 2020 – providing a significant contribution to closing the investment gap for climate-friendly infrastructure in both developed economies and emerging markets. It argues for several sets of policy actions to support and enable the green bond market to grow:
- Market building activities are the low cost means to enable green bond markets to grow: Establish green project pipeline, strengthen local bond markets, strategic public green bond issuance and development of green bond standards.
- Proven support tools provide an additional boost to the market at its early stage: Strategic public green bond investment, credit enhancement, tax incentives and development of instruments to aggregate assets and structure risks.
- Innovative ideas are being trialled in some countries: Adjust risk weightings for green investments, preference green investments in central bank operations.
The purpose of this paper, The Value of Everything, is to begin the process of clarifying global asset value especially as may be affected by the sustainability (or lack thereof) of financial systems, and not just that which is represented by institutional assets under management. This paper, therefore, will answer this question of what is the actual total value of all global asset classes individually and in aggregate, towards helping inform money flows as they relate to this overall global stock, and how do they or can they influence total value, as well as how should these stocks and flows shift to enable the financial system to become truly sustainable and how to measure for that.
Electronic markets and high-frequency trading (HFT) now comprise over half of all securities trading on both public “lit” exchanges and “unlit” dark pools and electronic platforms.
On 3 November 2014 Ethical Markets Media and the UNEP Inquiry convened an expert seminar in New York, bringing together securities market experts and traders to examine how the issues of electronic markets and high-frequency trading relate to the broader efficiency, effectiveness and resilience of financial markets in the face of environmental and social challenges, and to consider the potential of several market-based reforms.