2018 年 10 巻 1 号 p. 16-28
Investment needs for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are huge. Official resource flows cannot make up the gap, and private market financing is on the rise. SDGs bonds issued by the World Bank, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC), and the Australian and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ) were all oversubscribed, mainly by institutional investors motivated by the SDGs’ promise to save humanity, the planet and ensure global prosperity. As the corporate sector and the financial markets increase their role in SDGs financing, the challenge for the issuers is how to balance financial reward incentives and the necessity to account for sustainable development impact, which is the basic motivation for most SDGs bonds investors. How can SDGs linked bonds indexes and prices be made to respond to SDGs progress? Insights from financial theory suggest that indexes of bonds issued for development purposes should have a strong correlation with an indicator of well-being and economic progress. A cross-sectional regression of the SDGs Index (a measure of SDGs performance) against the Gross National Income per capita (a proxy for well-being), based on a sample of 117 countries, revealed a strong positive correlation between the two aggregates. From this finding, we recommend that SDGs bonds be linked to the SDGs Index; in this way, bond prices and indexes will reflect sustainable development performance. Moreover, since the relevance of the 17 SDGs, their baselines and pace of progress vary from one country or region to the other, we suggest that SDGs bonds target specific countries or regions, and thematic areas of the SDGs.
