국민연금의 사회책임투자 정책에 대한 비판적 고찰

For the last few years, National Pension Service (NPS) has been adopting ‘socially responsible investment’ (SRI) policy after long hesitation. The change is dramatically exemplified in the NPS’s exercise of the voting right at the shareholders' general meeting of Korean Air. Still, the ratio of SRI to the total investment of NPS is very disappointing and the SRI principles have not yet been firmly embedded throughout its investment policy. This paper makes a critical appraisal of the NPS’s current SRI policy and presents an alternative approach to SRI policy for NPS. Based on Carroll’s CSR pyramid, this paper proposes an SRI typology which is to be used as a framework to assess the SRI policy of NPS. It divides generic SRI policies into 3 specific models: Economist Model (A Model), in which investors consider ESG factors in terms of economic profit maximization; Minimalist Model (B Model), which emphasizes negative ethical screen based on the ethical norms, and; Maximalist Model (C Model), which obligates investors to make philanthropic investments. This paper shows that NPS investment policy is based on A Model, while global communities like UN and OECD recommend B Model. This paper recommends that NPS should adopt B Model because A Model defines SRI so narrowly that it can hardly seem ‘socially’ responsible and C Model is so prone to being influenced by political consideration that it is unlikely to harmonize with the principles of the market economy. And it points out that NPS’s exercise of ‘business and human rights’ (BHR) management, which is required by the government policy on the BHR of public institutions, will automatically result in adoption of B Model, because for institutional investors SRI and BHR are so closely converged that there are almost no differences between the two. By fully exercising BHR management, NPS can rightfully declare that its fund is 100 % managed under SRI principles.