In recent years, environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing has grown in popularity in virtually all asset classes. Despite the robust performance of many ESG indexes since the global financial crisis, investors still express skepticism about alpha potential or ascribe the observed benefits to more traditional factors. This is especially true among emerging market (EM) investors where ESG is poorly understood. This event aimed to educate emerging market investors as to the current...

The Samarco tailings dam failure, the community opposition to Newmont Mining’s Conga project and Southern Copper’s Tia Maria projects in Peru, and the issue of declining water supplies in Chile have highlighted the importance of water related risks in the mining sector. Several trends suggest that water (intake and discharge) will increasingly become a primary risk in mining investments: More waste must be securely stored as falling grades require more ore to be processed. Mining...

Government contracting of projects and services, which represents trillions of dollars of expenditure and about 15% of the global GDP, is often prone to inefficiency and corruption. Dishonesty and mismanagement can result in the downfall of projects and of companies that receive contracts, as recent developments in Brazil have shown. Recent innovations in open contracting policies and practices have aimed to combat these issues by implementing new standards of fairness and transparency...

After ending 2014 with major corporate scandals in China (GlaxoSmithKline), Brazil (Petrobras) and Portugal (Banco Espírito Santo), some investors thought we were back to business as usual in 2015. Instead, Brazil’s Operação Lava Jato (Operation Car Wash) corruption probe mushroomed to an even broader investigation that has entwined senior management at some of the country’s largest corporations and dragged a number of bonds and stocks to distressed levels. These recent scandals are happening...

In the EU, US, Canada, and Norway, new laws requiring stricter mandatory disclosures about financial flows between natural resource companies and governments could reduce the risk of Petrobras style scandals. In the UK, for example, all LSE listed oil, gas, and mining companies must as of 2016 disclose tax, royalty, and other payments on a country-by-country and project-by-project basis. In the US, Dodd-Frank (Section 1504) requires similar disclosures but has yet to be implemented....