Socially Responsible Investment (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2011 in the subject Business economics - Investment and Finance, grade: 2, University of Innsbruck (Department of Banking and Finance ), course: Sales Management , language: English, abstract: In the light of the financial crisis SRI (Socially responsible investment) became popular as never before. SRI has already been around for quite some time before the crisis, but this industry has never seen such a volume increase as in the last 4 years. The EU market for SRI almost doubled since 2007 (Cropper, 2010). This clearly shows that the events forcing the financial crisis motivated investors to rethink their criteria for making their investment decisions. Naturally, such a high growth rate of an industry comes from an increasing demand. In order to satisfy the increasing demand for SRI products the SRI industry is going threw a 'transformative' and 'innovative' phase exploring new areas for SRI, creating new products and services. However, SRI investment has a very broad definition band and cannot be boxed in easily. Hence, as good as it might be, SRI investment brings also many challenges with it, because it is such a broad concept.

Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to give an overview about what SRI is and to find answers to the question of "How sustainable SRI is?"

In the first chapter the paper will discuss the different definitions and motivations for SRI investments. The second chapter will take a closer look on the history of the SRI market and the different categories and approaches to create an SRI portfolio. Further it will present the available product categories of the SRI market. The third chapter will analyse the development of the SRI market in Europe and the US. In the fourth chapter the performance of socially responsible investment will be analyzed. Finally the fifth chapter will discuss the main constraints of SRI.