Some good tips for you:
Try to get your education, health, and transport index to around 150.
Try to keep employment above 90%. Do this by building corporations. Try to focus on profitable corporations. Services are usually a safe bet.
If you don't already have a CEO, create a CEO account and build corporations in your own countries to start.
I would keep corporate tax around 20-30% too.
Get rid of all military spending on your secured country. It is not necessary, and most of the military units are useless. When you are ready to conquer another country to expand, you should purchase the select units that you need.
Set social security payment to 80%.
Set country ordering quality to max to increase welfare index. Having a higher welfare index allows corporations to produce more products, which means more profits.
For corporate settings, set salary for state corps to 200 and fo
Oh and another tip: create 5 back to work schools to retrain housewives and 5 special clinics for disabled people to get them back into the workforce. 5 is enough to max it out over time and maintain at max levels.
Another one. Keep government worker salary at 300. You want it to be higher than your state Corp salary so if you have shortages you dont end up closing down hospitals and schools or deactivating military units. Let the shortage affect corporations first.
The education priorities page is essential.
check it every time you login.
There must be workers available (unemployed) in each of the groups.
This way corporations can keep hiring.
If any of these professionals groups shows a shortage, the education priority might be too low.
If done well, your corporation will hire more people, they will upgrade and start producing profits.