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Africa's population is the second largest and fastest growing in the world after Asia, and this puts African governments under great stress in terms of increased public expenditure and is faced with a low revenue generation. Hence, the need for this study. The purpose of this paper is to examine the socio-economic determinants of public expenditure in Africa by assessing the influence of population age structure using a sample of the top ten most populous countries in Africa covering period of 1989 to 2018.

The study employed panel fully modified ordinary least square (OLS) in estimating the relevant relationship between the variables in the model. The dynamic ordinary least square (DOLS) model was also used to check the robustness of the fully modified ordinary least square (FMOLS) results.

The findings revealed that the major population age structure that influences the growth of public expenditure in Africa are population ages (0–14) and population ages (15–64), but the former poses a stronger significant influence than the latter while population ages (65 and above) has a negative and insignificant influence. Also, in terms of other socio-economic factors, self-employment has a reducing and significant influence on public expenditure. GDP per capita has a negative and insignificant influence while foreign aid and unemployment rate has an increasing influence. Finally, inflation rate and control of corruption (CC) has a negative relationship with public expenditure.

The study argues that an increase in the young and working population will put enormous pressure on the government in the provision of more jobs and other public infrastructures such as health care and education. In the context of African economy with a low revenue generation, public expenditure will be low and the desperately poor masses will be denied of these public infrastructures.

Several studies (Jibir and Aluthge, 2019; Tayeh and Mustafa, 2011; Okafor and Eiya, 2011; Obeng and Sakyi, 2017; Ofori-Abebrese, 2012) have investigated the determinants of public expenditure using total population as a variable. However, this study is unique as it focused on the influence of population age structure on public expenditure in Africa. Also, the study incorporated other socio-economic determinants of public expenditure such as self-employment, standard of living, inflation rate, unemployment rate, foreign aid and corruption in its analytical model. To the best of our knowledge, some of these variables have not been employed in previous studies.