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) estimator […]