Are there common alternative models of economic growth, compared to Solow's model

Question

I have been looking at the Solow growth model for many years, but after reading some of the Complexity Economics stuff, the Solow's model does seem way too simple for modelling important real world questions. I was wondering if there are other common alternative models for economic growth? Can anyone provide any citations, or authors to look for?

I am particularly interested in the dynamics between industries and such. So Solow's model kinda sweeps that under the rug, as it were.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Answer 1

I think that you should start reading the Ramsey–Cass–Koopmans model, where saving choices are made endogenous (whereas in the Solow-Swan model there were exogenous). Then, the milestone literature for modern economic growth theory is about: Product variety model of Romer (1990). A similar argument was written by Gene Grossman and Helpman (1991). Then, you have the Schumpeterian growth model developed by Aghion & Howitt (1992,1998).

Another argument that is becoming increasingly popular is the effect of automation, and artificial intelligence on long-run economic growth and income inequality (see Acemoglu and Restrepo, 2018; Prettner and Strulik, 2020, Hemous and Olsen, 2020)

Answer 2

An older example that places emphasis on inter-industry relations by using an input-output model is von Neumann's growth model featured in his 1945 article "A Model of General Economic Equilibrium".

In this model, technology has constant return to scale and industries produce by using the goods of other industries, i.e., industry $i$ uses $a_{ij}$ units of industry $j$ to produce a unit of good $i$. (Inputs from all industries $j$ may be needed, this is a Leontief-type production function.) The growth rate is determined by the largest eigenvalue of the input matrix populated by these numbers $a_{ij}$.