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Capital and the Common Good

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Capital and the Common Good

How Innovative Finance Is Tackling the World's Most Urgent Problems

Columbia UP,

15 min read
10 take-aways
Audio & text

What's inside?

Government aid isn’t the only way to assist the poor. Add financial innovation and the “visible hand.”

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Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

  • Innovative
  • Eye Opening
  • Overview

Recommendation

In this guide to using high finance to address the world’s ills, Georgia Levenson Keohane, executive director of the social-issues-oriented Pershing Square Foundation, comes across as both an idealist and a pragmatist. Keohane explains how financial innovators can help the world’s poor through such instruments as microfinance, microinsurance, green bonds and “vaccine bonds.” She calls for a “visible hand” that takes a middle path between government intervention and free market capitalism. getAbstract recommends Keohane’s smart, encouraging report to financial professionals and to readers interested in fresh approaches to beating poverty.

Summary

Market Solutions for the Poor 

For the globe’s poorest people, jobs and economic development are crucially important. The only way the poor can escape problems such as high infant mortality and diseases like malaria and tuberculosis is to improve their subsistence-level incomes. In India and Brazil, as well as across Africa, GDP growth has been running at 5% per year for a decade. The market’s invisible hand has begun to improve the lives of the poor, but the market itself can’t fix all their social ills or repair the prevailing economic inequalities. Ending poverty requires a “visible hand” to guide economies, address market failures and divert resources where needed. “Innovative finance” doesn’t have to rely on state intervention. Governments in many fragile nations have shown that they’re powerless to stem the tide of suffering. Nonprofits and socially minded investors can guide projects that focus on the public good.

IFFIm

The International Finance Facility for Immunization (IFFIm) created “vaccine bonds” that raised billions from capital markets. The vaccine bonds were the brainstorm of Christopher Edgerton-Warburton...

About the Author

Executive director of the Pershing Square Foundation Georgia Levenson Keohane is a professor in Columbia University Business School’s Social Enterprise Program.

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