The new frontiers of sovereign investment / edited by Malan Rietveld and Perrine Toledano.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) can be effective tools for national resources revenue management. These state-owned investments, funded by commodity exports, foreign exchange reserves, or other national assets, are adaptable to the challenges posed by financial shocks and have been successfully employed in an increasing number of countries. The number of SWFs continues to grow, with the largest funds managing trillions of dollars in assets among them. However, given the significant variations among SWFs, it can be difficult to compare funds that differ in size, scope, and mandate. This book provides a sorely needed practical look at how these funds work--and how they should work.

The New Frontiers of Sovereign Investment combines the insights and experience of academic economists and practitioners from several funds to survey a diverse financial landscape and establish the challenging topical questions facing a broad range of SWFs today: Should they serve both economic development and financial returns, and how? Will responsible investment enhance long-term returns? How can fiscal rules for SWFs be improved to meet emerging economic challenges? The book considers these questions as they apply to both long-established and newer SWFs. Featuring contributions from sovereign wealth practitioners from Alberta's AIMCo, the Nigerian Sovereign Investment Authority, and the New Zealand Superannuation Fund, as well as analysis by scholars at the forefront of sovereign investment, this volume provides timely and much-needed information on these rapidly evolving institutions.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

"New Frontiers" is apt in the title of this volume, as the editors have achieved their goal of covering a wide and expanding territory. The contributors represent academics and practitioners, and the editors describe their "common understanding" of sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) as being "extra-budgetary mechanisms holding a (generally natural resource-based) fiscal or foreign exchange reserve surplus." This in and of itself is useful in that writings about SWFs have not often shared a common definition (not even that put forth by the International Monetary Fund). Organized this way, the discussions of the tremendous diversity in such funds (whether in terms of size, usually measured as monetary amount of assets under management; goals; practices; or economic context, notably, whether they are based in developed versus developing nations) become more coherent. More importantly, the volume provides a context in which the growth of SWFs can be examined and the likely future growth can be assessed. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through professionals. --Mary H. Lesser, Lenoir-Rhyne University