Refinitiv debuts country sustainable development scores
Provider of financial markets data and infrastructure Refinitiv today announced Country Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Scores as a key data-metric in the transition to sustainable investing.
The Country SDGs scores are informed by Refinitiv’s macroeconomic time series database Datastream®, and are available through Refinitiv Eikon. They are designed to transparently and objectively measure a country’s relative performance across each of the SDGs and sub-metrics.
The Country SDGs scores cover 210 countries, 17 UN SDGs and 148 benchmarked metrics that compose the SDGs. They are calculated on an annual basis using the latest available information, providing an overall SDG level and individual metric level performance scores. In total, there are 242 detailed indicators that feed into each of the 17 SDGs.
A bottom-up approach was taken to map each of the 242 indicators outlined in the framework against the 8.5 million active economic indicators available in Datastream. Where there are two or more countries with the same final score, further analysis and differentiation would take place on the underlying 17 SDG scores as per an investor’s preferences.
Leon Saunders Calvert, Head of Sustainable Investing, Lipper and I&A Insights, Refinitiv, comments: “Sovereign issuance of capital is a critical component of sustainable financing and being able to quantify, for the purposes of investment allocation decisions, the ESG footprint of countries as well as of companies, makes this enhancement an important augmentation of the assets that Refinitiv continues to bring to bear to support the mainstreaming of ESG data into financial markets.”
Earlier this year, Refinitiv debuted Fund ESG Scores to facilitate industry transition to sustainable investing. In 2019, Refinitiv brought together its ESG Sustainable Investing and Lipper Fund Ratings businesses to increase focus on unearthing links between sustainable business strategies and financial performance.
Let’s note that, earlier in October 2020, Refinitiv announced the acquisition of Hong Kong based Red Flag Group, in a move growing Refinitiv’s ESG due diligence business.