ESG-finance principles as the key drivers of Russian regions’ investment potential

Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation, Leningradsky prospect, 49, 125993 Moscow, Russia

Abstract

This article presents an analysis of challenges and prospects for the development of responsible investment in Russia and gives a detailed description of the ESG-finance principles (ESG - Environmental, Social, Governance). The new economic conditions cause necessity to search the new methodology approaches in different theoretical fields. The author gives a wide summary of approaches to precise an investment potential of the regions in Russia and makes a conclusion that all of the existing assessment tools are not perfect and need to be improved. Such an enhancement could be based on the results of the a pairwise correlation analysis: the author considers data sampling for all the regions of the Russian Federation and tests it with four indicators: the investment activity of the region, as a resulting indicator; environmental protection costs, the number of companies disclosing non-financial reporting and percentage of companies in the region implementing innovations in the framework of energy conservation, as factors in assessing the investment potential of the region.