Japan’s Government Pension Investment Fund (GPIF) will benchmark another 1.3 trillion yen (US$12.5 billion) of sustainable investments in foreign equities against two indices from MSCI Inc. and Morningstar.
The pension fund, which adopted environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing in 2017, had outsourced around 5.7 trillion yen of ESG investments in both domestic and foreign equities as of end-2019.
These are benchmarked against five indices developed by MSCI, FTSE Russell and S&P Dow Jones Indices.
The two new additions for foreign equity investments are the MSCI ACWI ESG Universal Index and Morningstar Gender Diversity Index.
According to GPIF President Miyazono Masataka, they are in line with “our objective of improving long-term returns through enhanced sustainability of individual issuers and the market as a whole”.