Managing public investment funds : best practices and new challenges

"Publicly-held pools of assets have grown dramatically over the last several years, and they are playing an increasingly prominent role in cross-national investments. This paper examines how to better secure prudent and economically sound public fund management practices, focusing on ways to formulate and build a strong governance structure for managing the assets, how one might protect the assets from political interference, and what sensible investment policy might entail. We compare three distinct forms of public funds, namely foreign exchange reserve funds, sovereign wealth funds, and public pension funds, to highlight similarities and differences between these. We also explore how their management structure relates to governance practices and country-specific characteristics, drawing from the pension and corporate finance literature. Last, we discuss alternative means of managing public reserve funds in aging economies such as Japan, to help meet future social security liabilities in the face of rapid demographic aging"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site