Trading Social Credits

The Economic Times in an article today informs that the government is planning to ask corporate houses to be more transparent about their social spending under the head corporate social responsibility (CSR). In a post in this blog some days ago, I had posted a question – Can we have a specialized exchange to trade "social credits" in order to develop capital markets for non-profits? Large corporations have corporate social responsibility (CSR) budgets that are spent on a variety of development projects. If NGOs (and even Government agencies that are responsible for implementing developmental programmes) could quantify the social returns they generate and bundle them through instruments which I call “social credits”, these could be sold to corporate houses, donors, socially motivated investors, government agencies which can utilize their CSR/developmental budgets for purchasing such social credits. Such trades can be facilitated through social credit exchanges, which would allow NGOs to raise resources for their developmental projects. NGOs that have high social credits would be able to generate more resources. Social credits themselves would be a function of the social impacts that are generated by these organizations. The quantification of such impacts is a challenge; however, the step that the government is planning is in line with the argument presented above.