Robert Solow and the Development of Growth Economics

This collection addresses the history of modern growth economics and the role of the American economist and Nobel laureate Robert Solow in developing it as a major area of research in macroeconomics and economic theory. While the concept of growth has been central to economic thought since at least the eighteenth century, the modern analysis of growth using formal models came about largely because of Solow’s articles “A Contribution to the Theory of Economic Growth” and “Technical Change and the Aggregate Production Function.”
The essays in this supplement consider the rise of growth economics as an active field of research in the 1950s, its extension into other branches of the discipline in the 1960s, its decline in the 1970s, and its return to the center stage of macroeconomics over the last twenty years.