On Friday, April 5, 2013 Geoffrey Mazullo, Principal, Emerging Markets ESG, and Adjunct Professor, School of American Law (SAM), Gdansk and Wroclaw, Poland, delivered a lecture on socially responsible investment (SRI) at the Riga Business School in Latvia.
In the lecture, Mr. Mazullo introduced Socially Responsible Investment (SRI). The lecture quantified the size of the SRI markets, profiled SRI approaches and assessed SRI performance. Examples were provided from developed and emerging markets. Each Friday, Emerging Markets ESG publishes a weekly expert interview entitled, “Five Questions about SRI.” The second year of the interview series ended on March 8, 2013. The lecture featured the opinions of 104 academics, experts and practitioners who contributed interviews during the first two years of the interview series. Aggregating the responses to the five questions in the interview series, the lecture presented how practitioners define SRI and differentiate SRI from mainstream investment. It also described the challenges companies in emerging markets face in managing environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues and the challenges investors face in analyzing ESG criteria at investee companies in emerging markets. At the end of the lecture, the realities of SRI in Latvia and the Baltic Republics were debated and discussed.