World’s Top Pension Fund Treads Water as ESG Picks Up Pace
- Japan’s GPIF has been constrained by stricter legal restraints
- Can’t sacrifice returns for sake of buying ESG names: Shiomura
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After taking over the helm of the world’s biggest pension fund in 2015, Hiromichi Mizuno helped chart a course that not just made sustainable investing big in Japan, but also raised the strategy’s global profile.
The Government Pension Investment Fund’s former chief investment officer sidestepped public bemusement and criticism at home, as he sought to turn GPIF into a fund that -- as one Harvard Business Review article put it -- tried to “change the world” through its approach to environmental, social and governance investing.