고려대학교

초록/요약

Although the economic materialism has been strongly believed as one and only tool for achieving economic prosperity for the last century, the increasing environmental and social concerns, such as climate change, resource depletion, displaced people and chronic poverty, have required changing the quality of growth. With intense recognition on these malfunctions of the economic materialism, ‘sustainability’ has become one of the key issues for the 21st century. Sustainable finance is an innovative response from the finance industry to the increasing demand for the sustainable development, which has been evolved from the public awareness and in the process of environmental legislation and corporate environmentalism. This virtuous circle to the sustainable finance has been mainly discussed in the developed economies, so it is at the point to be applied to the developing economies now. Financial market plays an important role in the economy with its capital intermediary activities. Borrowers and investors of capital communicate under the banks’ intermediation process, therefore the finance sector has an influential power to other economic elements. Even though the banking industry’s internal issues have weak environmental effect, the external issues can bring about business risks through the intermediary functions. In other hand, banks can create opportunities of additional revenues and cost savings by implementing sustainable financing policy. There are three types of initiatives for sustainable finance; (1) The Equator Principles, (2) UNEP Finance Initiative, and (3) UK pension fund. The Equator Principles (the EPs) are a set of voluntary environmental and social guidelines which are applied to the members of the private financial institutions, while the UNEP Finance Initiative (UNEP FI) is a unique public-private partnership between the United Nations and the financial sector, designed to working together to understand environmental and social impacts of financial performance. And UK pension fund is a good example of governmental initiative for the sustainable finance. It proves how government can change the conservative attitude towards environmental policies and act as a market catalyst by creating demand pull. In order to make the sustainable finance be proliferated in the developing economies, barriers and challenges should be identified. There are barriers that hinder sustainable finance efforts, such as (1) priority in economic growth, (2) lack of government capacity, (3) economic instability and political uncertainty, and (4) lack of awareness on the environmental issues. Lessons from the developed economies need to be applied to the developing economies to make the sustainable finance available globally. Firstly, the public-private partnership should be strengthened to fulfill the broader sustainability goals of profit, environmental and social soundness. Public sector can play a catalyst role of providing positive incentives to the private investors. It is proved that economic benefits, such as investment attraction, are more effective rather than the regulatory punishment, therefore proper incentives should be given to the developing economies to make them actively take part in the initiatives for sustainable finance.