Markets in virtue: the promise of ethical funds and micro‐credit

Abstract

The politics of ethical correctness responds on occasion – or often as its detractors would claim – only to enlightened self‐interest. To set up an ethical fund, or to commit to a micro‐finance programme, may be a mere concession to the Zeitgeist or an indirect enhancement of self‐esteem. Nonetheless, the homage to virtue raises contemporary question and issues. The money committed to ethical funds is far from trivial. In the USA, every tenth dollar is invested in “ethical” financial instruments. They are rapidly developing in Europe. As for micro‐credit experiments, they have been shown, from Bangladesh to Bolivia, to bring widely spread benefits to all. As this article stresses, the experience of ethical funds and micro‐credit, while it does not fill the gap between past and future, nonetheless bears the promise of a future. It gives a time horizon, a view of what is to come, in which what has come to be known as international civil society participates.