GEFI spoke at the Edinburgh Futures Conversations to discuss the future economy. GEFI founder & managing director Omar Shaikh appared alongside former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, and Chinelo Anohu, Head of the AfDB’s Africa Investment Forum.

Omar emphasised that the SDGs must be at the heart of the future economy. They go beyond technological advances (no doubt important) to fundamentally reshape the way we conduct ourselves, placing purpose at the centre of the economy. Profit and purpose, the triple bottom line, conscious consumerism are all terms increasingly prevalent in financial markets. Paul Polman’s work at Unilever was a great ambassador for such.

Purpose, he argued, gets us to the ontological question – the question of being, of what the economy is and what it is for. If it is to provide the essentials and comforts of life, then that immediately leads to the question of what is the good life, and how much is enough? This chimes with Adam Smith’s challenge of reconciling between his two great mentors Hutchison and Hume – balancing innate goodness with self interest.

At GEFI’s flagship annual Ethical Finance Summit, Prof John Kay illustrated in his presentation how social purpose had been slowly stripped out of the narrative within annual reports of multinational Plcs since the 1960s towards a nearly exclusive focus on return on equity and financial performance – in effect shareholder primacy.

We now stand at a point in time where the pendulum appears to be swinging the other way: financial markets and the economy are placing purpose alongside profit. This incorporation of ethical values was historically a maligned practice, seen as the domain of ‘tree-huggers’, but that has changed via the demands of staff, shareholders, regulators and customers.

For example, we now see a total of:

  • $35.3 trillion USD in sustainable investment
  • Over $100 trillion USD managed by members of the Principles for Responsible Investment
  • $1trn+ USD in impact investing

Omar concluded by reflecting on the many more areas where the future economy can improve upon the past, especially with fintech readdressing the fundamental intermediation role of traditional financial institutions. Challenges remain, be that around nature and biodiversity or around social issues, from poverty, to inclusive growth, to addictive products such as tobacco and gambling.

Gordon Brown followed, highlighting the importance of recognising global interdependence, suggesting that “global problems require global solutions”, from the financial crisis to the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic has completely exposed the limits of individualism. There must be a break from the 40-year-old Washington consensus, building a new relationship between state, market and society. In particular, there needs to be a reevaluation of the need for fiscal policy.

He focused on the global failure to distribute vaccines equitably around the world, emphasising that this is not simply an unjust policy, but a self-defeating one, asking what this means for the fight against climate change. We can clearly identify both the problem and the solution, but the ‘us versus them’ ideology of political nationalism prevents us from reaching a mutually beneficial solution. Brown suggested that, in the words of Adam Smith who had been mentioned earlier by Omar Shaikh, there needs to be a “circle of sympathy”.