Social Policy Bonds blog: Almost there

11 March 2013

Almost there

More on Social Impact Bonds in the Economist of 23 February. I've posted about SIBs and compared them to Social Policy Bonds in previous posts (here, for example). I'm glad to see the concept of payment for performance enter social policy. The flaw, though, remains that SIBs don't appear to be tradable and so, under a SIB regime, as the Economist says:

Projects which take many years to have an effect (the impact of pre-school education on university admissions, say) will not interest investors.

I have outlined my reasons for advocating tradability of the bonds here. It does appear, I'm pleased to say, that there are bodies interested in making a secondary market for SIBs.

When I first came up with the idea of Social Policy Bonds one of my colleagues told me that I was 20 years ahead of my time. He was almost right: it's been 25 years. This long pdf contains my first published paper on the subject and is dated 1988.

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Social Policy Bonds in the media

13 June 2018: my short article Make Social Impact Bonds Tradeable, appears on the website of Alliance, a magazine for philanthropy and social investment.

25 May 2018: a short article on Social Policy Bonds and their possible application in India, appears on Market Express (India). It is by Dr Ashok V Desai and titled Incentivizing welfare.

9 October 2015: An article by Greg Bearup on the genesis of the Social Policy Bond idea, and application of a version of it in Australia appears in the Weekend Australian Magazine. (The article can also be downloaded as a pdf from here.)

October 2013: Professor Robert Shiller of Yale University, is named as one of the three winners of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Economics. His Nobel Prize lecture (pdf) delivered on 8 December, mentions Social Policy Bonds. Professor Shiller has for many years encouraged my work on Social Policy Bonds, beginning in late 1996 when he sent me this letter.

3 May 2012: An audio talk by Nobel Prize winner Professor Robert Shiller at the London School of Economics, in which Social Policy Bonds are briefly mentioned, is available here.

18 April 2012: Robert Shiller, Professor of Economics at Yale University, mentions Social Policy Bonds in his new book Finance and the Good Society. He also mentions the concept in a Huffington Post article. It's the eighth of his Ten Ways Finance Can Be a Force for Good in Society, and is also mentioned in a short profile piece about Professor Shiller.