Local trading: Helps your score (short term) but hurts your economy? (Golden Rainbow)

Local and Common Market trading help your score. But ti seems to me they're a bad idea under most circumstances. I want my corporations to sell goods of very high quality. But I want my country to buy goods of base quality. Doesn't the money I make from that outweigh any advantage of the local and common markets? Unless someone's going for a prize, that is.

Yes and no.

It's good for buying goods that are in short supply as it ensures your supply at a predictable (albeit higher) price.

It's bad for selling goods that are in short supply as you can usually get a higher price (more profit) on the international market.

It can be good for selling goods that are oversupplied as they will probably sell for more than on the international market.

It's bad for buying goods that are oversupplied as you would get a better deal on the international market.

Others would say that Common Markets are a bad deal full stop [period]. I prefer to buy/sell a portion of my goods on the Local and CM to ensure a steady income/supply and source/sell the rest on the international market to make a little extra profit.

You get paid by your population for the goods that they consume (household products, food, etc.) so higher quality, and thus

OK, for consumer products, then, you're just giving up a little bit of likely profit for predictability. But for things the government uses rather than resells, the difference would be huge, as far as I can see.

My main is a CEO economy. The only state corps are Strategic. I contract the production to myself and sell plutonium to the weapons corps. I have a great CM score from that.

Adam

@Dvd

Yep. I have adopted a similar strategy to Adam: I have some nationalised corps that provide me with basic maintenance at quality 100 (you can set corps not to upgrade automatically on the Automation page).

They occasionally scrape a profit, but otherwise they are there to provide a vital service so I don't mind the expense.

International market can giver you a larger potential profit. But most of the time it is quite marginal. Even is very high deficit market situation markets you need to rely on immediate orders to make mega profits relative to base price selling. Also who offers all their production to the common market?

Lets say you can do well and manage to sell your goods +50% market price, even if you offer 50% of your production to the common market (which is quite a large commitment anyway) your still basically offering you goods for +25% market price. Market price of the goods x quality has a much larger effect on profit, then selling slightly higher above market price. "Estimated production" is only calculated at 100% production I think when committing to the common market, so if you pay higher salaries you will still make profit off the world market even if you commit 100% production.

All that said, I don't receive cont