How to improve the acceptance of ethically sustainable investments? - Findings of an empirical study

A majority of the western population seems to be very much concerned about ethics and sustainability. Surveys show that this is not the case in terms of real investments. Only a very small portion of the investment market goes to ethically sustainable investments. The purpose of this paper is to find out what might be reasons for the low acceptance of ethically sustainable investments and what needs to be done to attract further investors. Thereby, the focus of the investigation lies on private investors in German speaking countries. Through an extensive literature review and the conduction of expert interviews it is concluded that main reasons for the low acceptance of ethically sustainable investments are a lack of transparency and standardisation, deficiencies in regard to certification, shortcomings in terms of financial advice and reservation about the performance. Different approaches to overcome the problems are presented in this paper.