EDITORIAL POLICY
Abstract:
This paper studies socially responsable investment in Spain. Specially, it focuses on a basic question, probably the first question made by socially responsible investors: how to identify companies with ethical and social responsible behavior. To this end, the paper describes how the international and the Spanish regulation define social responsible companies and how these companies are selected in order to be included in rankings and ethical stock indexes. Furthermore, the requisites that firms must meet to be included in the so called "ethical funds" are analysed, as well. As a conclusion of the research, it is observed that there exist great terminological confusion and less transparence regarding the application of the selected criteria. Moreover, when the criteria are clearly stated, it is identified that there is no relation between what is commonly understood by particular investors to be ethical or socially responsible and what those criteria are demanding. This fact is made even more evident when it is observed that some companies which are included in the rankings of ethic firms or in ethical stock indexes have been fined repeatedly for not complying the legislation. This behavior should automatically exclude them from the rankings and the indexes, if a simple definition of ethical behavior or social responsibility is applied.
This paper studies socially responsable investment in Spain. Specially, it focuses on a basic question, probably the first question made by socially responsible investors: how to identify companies with ethical and social responsible behavior. To this end, the paper describes how the international and the Spanish regulation define social responsible companies and how these companies are selected in order to be included in rankings and ethical stock indexes. Furthermore, the requisites that firms must meet to be included in the so called "ethical funds" are analysed, as well. As a conclusion of the research, it is observed that there exist great terminological confusion and less transparence regarding the application of the selected criteria. Moreover, when the criteria are clearly stated, it is identified that there is no relation between what is commonly understood by particular investors to be ethical or socially responsible and what those criteria are demanding. This fact is made even more evident when it is observed that some companies which are included in the rankings of ethic firms or in ethical stock indexes have been fined repeatedly for not complying the legislation. This behavior should automatically exclude them from the rankings and the indexes, if a simple definition of ethical behavior or social responsibility is applied.
| Download PDF | -- | Tweet |
|---|
|
Finance, Markets and Valuation (e-ISSN 2530-3163) is an Open Access research e-journal. Contents published on the journal are licensed a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0) |