Are Asian Sovereign Wealth Funds Different?

Rise of the Fiduciary State: A Survey of Sovereign Wealth Fund Research

“…The two measures are quite similar in stressing how transparent the funds are with respect to their internal organization, the amount of information they disclose about fund investments, and their political distance from the host/sponsoring government. In constructing the index, Truman () links together the following elements into four categories: “(1) structure of the fund, including its objectives, links to the government's fiscal policy, and whether the fund is independent from the countries’ international reserves; (2) governance of the fund, including the roles of the government, the board of the fund and its managers, and whether the fund follows guidelines for corporate responsibility; (3) accountability and transparency of the fund in its investment strategy, investment activities, reporting, and audits; and (4) behavior of the fund in managing its portfolio and its risk management policies, including the use of leverage and derivatives” (http://www.iie.com/publications/briefs/truman4983.pdf). The maximum possible Truman score is 100 and the highest score assigned in 2011 (the last year available) is 96, for Norway's GPFG.…”

“…Section describes how SWFs are organized and operated, and details the key measures developed to assess the operational and informational transparency of different funds—the Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute's Linaburg‐Maduell Index and the Truman (, ) SWF Scoreboard. This section concludes by comparing the organizational structures, corporate governance systems, and investment patterns observed for SWFs with those documented empirically for other internationally active institutional investors, both state‐owned and private.…”

“…We then document the surprising number of countries (26) that have proposed or launched new SWFs just since January 2008, usually in direct response to a major new natural resource discovery, and almost always using Norway's Government Pension Fund Global (GPFG) as an organizational and investment policy model. Section 2 describes how SWFs are organized and operated, and details the key measures developed to assess the operational and informational transparency of different funds-the Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute's Linaburg-Maduell Index and the Truman (2008Truman ( , 2011 SWF Scoreboard. This section concludes by comparing the organizational structures, corporate governance systems, and investment patterns observed for SWFs with those documented empirically for other internationally active institutional investors, both state-owned and private.…”

The Financial Statecraft of Emerging Powers

“…However unrealistic, this perception is real and is in itself is a factor shaping responses to SWFs, including instances where their investments have been blocked by political actors on either security or protectionist grounds (Truman 2011;Park and Estrada 2009). This puts significant constraints on the ability of surplus countries to manage foreign assets in ways that yield higher financial returns.…”

“…The Santiago Principles are a voluntary code of conduct for SWFs developed by the International Working Group of Sovereign Wealth Funds, consisting largely of developing countries with SWFs. The development of the Principles -which in themselves are unremarkable -was an explicit attempt to ward off protectionist responses to SWF purchases of distressed assets during the GFC (Truman 2011).…”