Redington: ESG, stewardship and sustainability principles in EM sovereign debt

Late to the party

It’s fair to say that the fixed income manager community has caught up with equity firms in terms of the quality and level of focus on ESG considerations in recent years.

But it's one thing to integrate ESG principles into corporate bond investing and a very different one to do it in more esoteric asset classes such as emerging market debt (EMD). Due to multiple factors, but largely driven by a higher degree of complexity and lack of sufficient and reliable information, it's no surprise that responsible investing in EMD sovereigns came a little late to the party. So what are EMD managers up to in this area? In late 2021, our fixed income research team conducted a large-scale research process on the full spectrum of the EMD manager universe, which shone...