This article was written by Laura Colby from Bloomberg Briefs. It appeared first on the Bloomberg Terminal.
Global socially responsible investments grew by a quarter to $23 trillion over the last two years, with particularly strong gains in China, Japan and Australia and New Zealand.
While every region reported growth in socially responsible assets over the 24 months ending Dec. 31, 2015, the overall pace slowed from the 61 percent growth reported in the prior two-year period, according to a biennial survey by the Global Sustainable Investment Alliance.
GSIA gathers results from regional sustainable investment groups around the world, tracking professionally managed funds that use responsible investing criteria. It includes impact investment and environmental, social, governance funds as well as portfolios that simply exclude weapons manufacturers or gambling companies. Those so-called exclusionary strategies represented $15 trillion — more than half of the assets studied.
The growth far outpaced that of invested assets under management broadly, which stalled in 2015 at about $71.4 trillion, according to Boston Consulting Group. While the vast majority of socially responsible investments are still held by pension funds and other institutions, retail investors now account for 26 percent, up from 13 percent at the end of 2013.
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