In this episode of ESG360, Dr Peter Matanle, Senior Lecturer at the University of Sheffield’s School of East Asian Studies speaks about a bold new project combining the commercial expertise of Nomura with the University of Sheffield’s prestigious School of East Asian Studies to deepen and broaden knowledge about a comparatively underdeveloped area of financial services research: ESG in East Asia: The ‘S’ Factor.

In part 1, Peter talks about the history and social principles behind the S in ESG including Asia’s long tradition of stakeholder inclusion. Japan’s model of welfare capitalism emerged in the inter-war years out of a combination of traditional values and firms needing to retain scarce high quality human capital. Early espousers of such an ethos were the 19th century capitalist Eichi Shibusawa, and Konosuke Matsushita, who founded and developed the Panasonic brand.

There is now widening acknowledgement that corporations are embedded in complex interdependent environmental, political-economic, and socio-cultural systems which they have profound effects upon, and which they gain from economically. Consequently, concern over their ‘socializing the cost and privatizing the profit’ has deepened.