Thanks for the post Timbo. The issues I have the Solow models are:
1) It is specific to the country/region that it is measuring. In other words it measures the growth of the Chinese economy relative to the Chinese economy and not specifically per capita income increases within China or relative values internationally within the domestic model. The problem with this is more obvious when looking at many African economies where growth rates have been very high for decades at a time but population growth has been greater and so per capita income has dropped. Also, labour intensive production without a banking system to distribute capital, and a legal system which defines ownership (and so allows assets to be valued and leveraged), hugely limits the possibility of movement to higher-tech production and increases in per capita income levels. Which leads me to;
2) “Technology”. I know that in the context of an economic growth model "technology" is essentially the ability of a country/economy to combine inputs (labour and capital) to produce the optimum output but it's very hard to hold that thought and not drift back, however subconsciously, to thinking about technology at technological advancement.
I n a nutshell it is a good model for measuring output which makes it a useful tool to answer a specific question but it's hardly the economics equivalent of a unified field theory in physics.
Again, I'm open to correction on all of the above.
Basically the model robustly predicts changes in output over time compared with other competing theories (see neoclassical endogenous growth theories).
The most important implication is that all the nonsense you see and hear about "promoting growth", "creating knowledge economies", all types of industry policies and attempts to "pick winners" from politicians, commentators and forum contributors amounts to ill informed drivel.
All you can do is make your economy open to technology and a free trade in all things and allow it to adjust its use of resources naturally and keep a minimal public sector footprint on the economy.
However, politicians and interest groups couldn't have that.
1) What you identify here is no flaw in the model. PErhaps you are thinking about the most simple Solow growth model. It has been found that a number of other factors can help determine output.
For example, corruption is a negative, as is civil disruption and violence, lack of well enforced property rights, laws etc. Your African examples all fail on those, while successful developing nations all pass on those.
An interesting one which often people find counter intuitive is that democratic forms of government are a negative. Benign dictatorship appears superior. By that I mean that, democracy follows development and prgression to first would levels of income, it does not lead. Again compare African democracies with less democratice countries like Malaysia or Indonesia, or China.
All in all the model is quite good in a predictive sense and tells us that you can't create growth in incomes and propsrity, you can only get in the way and retard it in some way or another:
Something Irish governmetns have appeared adept at doing in the past and look like repeating now.
2) Technology simply means the state of human thinking and enterprise at any point in time. Apart from a very small number of exceptions (e.g. monopoly patents, protects military secrets etc.) this is avaiable to be deployed anywhere in the world. Pretty much the same level of technical knowledge is avaiable to any geographical location in the world - there are no boundaries to human knowledge. It just is.