Filling out an ESG survey can be a nightmare. There are hundreds of data points to chase, and they don’t even effectively measure a company’s impact. Yet Alberto Alemanno, founder of The Good Lobby, and a professor at French business school HEC Paris, argues yet more data points should be added for an ESG rating to be effective: those that measure a company’s lobbying activities.
“Lobbying is a blind spot for ESG raters,” Alemanno told me in an interview this week. “Investors are becoming more and more interested in knowing how companies organize their lobbying because it can become material. But the amount of data they gather is very modest, very far from where it should be.”
