Yingfeng Ku

According to the data of The Global Sustainable Investment Alliance (2021) , majority of sustainable assets are in US and Europe. In other region such as Asia and developing countries, sustainable investment seems not so popular and only account for few parts of global sustainable assets. Herringer, et al. (2009) points out that the success of sustainable finance is depend on whether local government has solid understanding of the concept and ability of overcoming the challenges in sustainable finance. In Maslow's hierarchy of needs (Maslow, 1943) , need for self-actualization is in a high level, which means people need to meet the demand of physiological and safety first, or, the need for sustainable finance would not occur. Any regional crisis or economic backwardness will become an obstacle to the development of sustainable finance locally. For example, when the panic is coming, the flight of capital will only poor the local economic, rather than consider whether a project is s

When people are talking about sustainable finance, there are two main things they should consider in both sustainability and financial return. Many academic papers or investment institutions demonstrated the advantages of sustainable finance, such as better financial performance (Ortas, et al., 2015; Lee, et al., 2016; Yadav, et al., 2016) and risk reduction (Jansson & Biel, 2011; Morgan Stanley, 2019). While Lean & Nguyen (2014) and Cunha et al. (2020) argue that in the period of crisis, sustainable finance present a inferior return and risk performance. These researches express positive signs to investors, sustainable finance not only has better financial performance but also could achieve self-value of investors. But form the perspective of investment institutions, sustainable finance means they have to hire more sophisticate and cost more in human capital for meeting both the criteria of financial return and social return at the same time. Note: European Union Action Plan