Abstract

While economic theory suggests a wide range of potential drivers of public debt, there is little consensus regarding the most relevant ones. This paper analyzes the determinants of the public debt in Africa. This is done by adopting a Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA) approach applied to data of 51 African countries, spanning the period 1990–2018. Our results suggest that, among the set of twenty-seven (27) regressors considered, those reflecting international financial and institutional conditions as well as internal economic prospects tend to receive high posterior inclusion probabilities. Then, the study explores the effect of these regressors on public debt by employing the fixed effects (FE) and the system Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) estimators. The results reveal that, foreign aid, fiscal deficit, trade openness, military expenditure, interest and exchange rates, debt-service, domestic credit, government stability index, political regime type and socio-economic crises are the main and robust drivers of public debt accumulation in African countries. These findings are robust to changes in the model specification, the inclusion of socio-economic crises and regional heterogeneities.

摘要

尽管经济学理论认为公共债务的潜在驱动因素范围很广，但对于最相关的驱动因素却几乎没有共识。本文分析了非洲公共债务的决定因素。这是通过采用贝叶斯模型平均（BMA）方法应用于1990-2018年间51个非洲国家的数据来完成的。我们的结果表明，在所考虑的二十七（27）个回归变量中，反映国际金融和制度状况以及内部经济前景的回归变量倾向于获得较高的后验包含概率。然后，本研究通过采用固定效应（FE）和系统广义矩估计（GMM）估计器，探索了这些回归变量对公共债务的影响。结果表明，外国援助，财政赤字，贸易开放，军事支出，利率和汇率，还本付息，国内信贷，政府稳定指数，政治制度类型和社会经济危机是非洲国家公共债务积累的主要和强劲动力。这些发现对于模型规范的变化，社会经济危机和区域异质性的变化都是有力的。