Impact Investing: A New Asset Class or a Societal Refocus of Venture Capital?

Veronica Vecchi, Francesca Casalini, Luciano Balbo and Stefano Caselli

Chapter Chapter 15 in Public Private Partnerships for Infrastructure and Business Development, 2015, pp 275-293 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract Impact investing is the current trend, and it is garnering an increasing attention from society, institutions, and businesses. From one side, actually, contemporary society is looking at impact investing as a new paradigm to cope with the economic crisis and the curtailed public budgets and answer to the more and more diversified needs of its citizens. From the other side, private investors are searching for new investment opportunities to channel the enormous liquidity available. Globally, indeed, private wealth has never been so high: in 2013 total global financial assets grew to US$225 trillion, tripling the world’s GDP (McKinsey Global Institute 2014), even if only 22 percent of them are represented by equity investments, whose CAGR in the period 2007–2012 was -5.5 percent; high-net-worth individuals’ (hereafter HNWIs) financial wealth reached its peak of US$52.6 trillion worldwide in 2014, of which 13.5 percent is invested in alternative assets, with an increase of 3.4 percent from 2013 (Capgemini 2014). It is also important to notice that driving social impact is important for 92 percent of HNWIs; this trend is lead by younger investors (under 40 years) and by those located in emerging markets.

Keywords: Venture Capital; Social Enterprise; Private Equity; Social Entrepreneurship; Social Innovation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
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DOI: 10.1057/9781137541482_15

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