Quantitative growth of the economies has been at the focus of economic analysis. In modeling the quantitative economic growth process the quantitative or primal problem is focused on the rate of growth in the equilibrium, while in the dual formulation of the equilibrium problem the focus is on the combination of a real rate of interest and structural prices ensuring a sustained equilibrium solution. In the first formulation of this problem John von Neumann showed that the real rate of interest and the quantitative rate of growth are equal at the saddle point equilibrium. In this model as well as later reformulations the starting point is an economy operating in isolation from the rest of the world. In a globalized economy the role of the financial sector has to be introduced into the modeling effort. With such a reformulation not only growth of an existing economy but also births of new economies can be properly considered.
In recent decades the role of endogenous technological change by research and development efforts has become increasingly important. Most of the studies of the impact of new knowledge upon the economy has focused the attention on improved methods of production. However, improvement of the products and their qualitative characteristics is a more fundamental aspect of long-term economic development. Increasing quality implies mostly an increasing recipe or blueprint complexity of the products. Such an increase of quality and complexity of the products tends to go hand-in-hand with an increasing willingness to pay for the products. A simplified modeling framework is used to show that it is possible to model qualitative and quantitative economic growth within a coherent theoretical framework.