Sustainability
Tenured Harvard Business School professor, now at Oxford University.
I have previously written about how investors must address income inequality in a similar manner as climate change. It’s now over three years later and the investment community has yet to make serious progress on addressing the fundamental causes of this systemic issue. If anything, the issue has further entrenched itself and the situation is dire: between 1978 and 2019 U.S. worker pay rose 12 percent on average while executive compensation grew by 940 percent.
This trend is not solely a problem in the United States. Over the past 30 years almost 90 percent of advanced economies around the world have seen an increase in income inequality. Nearly half of global pay went to the top 10 percent of earners while the bottom 50 percent of earners received just 6.4 percent. While advancements have been made, income inequality still permeates all economies around the world, advanced or not.
Robert G. Eccles of Saïd Business School, University of Oxford is the author of a number of books on integrated reporting, sustainability and the role of business in society. His focus is on sustainability from both a company and investor perspective. Professor Eccles is also involved in a variety of initiatives to embed environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues in real world decision making. One of these is the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), of which he was the founding chairman. In 2018, Professor Eccles was selected by Barron’s as one of the top 20 influencers on ESG investing.
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