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The unsustainable public debt of most African economies adversely affects their economic growth and stability. This study aims to explore the influence of cross-country indicators of governance from African countries on public debt accumulation.

The study deployed a quantitative research design technique. Secondary data was used in this study. The frequency of the data is annual, and it is available from 1996 to 2022 for 48 countries in Africa. The study deployed the system generalized method of moments for the estimation.

The study finds that countries with high regulatory quality standards, control corruption and ensure effective governance accumulate less government debt while countries that abide by the rule of law instead accumulate more government debt. The study also finds that economic growth and government revenue reduce government gross debt while government expenditure and investments increase public debt.

Due to data unavailability, other factors which are likely to influence government debt accumulation were not included in the study as control variables. This is the limitation of the study.

African governments should strive to maintain high regulatory quality standards through the formulation and implementation of sound policies and regulations that permit and promote private sector development, and ensure quality and accountability of public and civil services. Governments are also urged to control corruption and enact good laws so that the enforcement of these laws will not worsen the risk of becoming debt-distressed.

Recent studies on governance and public debt were focused on the Arabian Gulf countries, countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and a combination of high and low-income countries. This study scrutinizes exclusively the effects of the quality of governance indicators on public debt accumulation, in the context of Africa.

The purpose of this study is to determine whether the Ottoman Empire’s net interest payments and foreign debt were sustainable or not in terms of their burden on budget revenues, using the method of historical econometric analysis.

In this study, the period between 1847 and 1882 of the Ottoman Empire is analyzed for sustainability analysis. Within the framework of the study, unit root tests and econometric analysis methods frequently used in the literature were used to analyze the sustainability of public debt. In the econometric analysis, in addition to various unit root tests, current econometric analysis methods, in particular Fourier expansion, were also used.

The results of econometric analyses showed that the burden of interest payments and foreign debt on the budget of the Ottoman state was unsustainable. This situation clearly shows the reason for the official bankruptcy of the Ottoman Empire, which was declared in 1875.

Although this study reveals the bankruptcy process of an important structure such as the Ottoman Empire in the historical process through econometric analyses, it also gives a very important message to today’s states. Accordingly, today’s state policies and decision-making mechanisms should take these results into account and strive to make the burden of public interest payments sustainable. It is believed that the study will shed light on the public finance policies of today’s states by drawing lessons from the collapse process of the Ottoman state.

Unlike the historical assessments in the literature on the decline of the Ottoman Empire, this study presents a cliometric approach by applying current econometric analysis techniques to past historical data. The study explains the unsustainability of the Ottoman Empire’s interest payments and external debt burden in the period under consideration in a way that, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, has not been done before.