A Realistic Market System?

This is a great game, but I feel it could be improved with a more realistic market system. The problem is there seems to be no central program which manages the economy. For example, inflation doesn’t seem to exist at all. I’m not sure how it could be implemented, but it would be very nice to have a more realistic system…

A possible way would be to group goods into categories, like food, entertainment etc, and have the supply and demand affected by what you do to the economy. The supply and demand would then effect other things, for example instead of having the event ‘car company shuts down’ the decrease in demand for personal transport would reduce supply and thus create job losses due to layoffs. If prices rose because of, for example, tighter controls on the industry, then this would affect poverty and thus increase crime.

It’s tricky knowing when to stop though. Are car companys suffering because of foreign competitors? and is that partly due to the exchange rate? or due to local labor laws making us less competitive, and is it because foreign companies have state-supported industries that compete unfairly? And how does the global demand for products affect each of our exports?

BUT

I think it can be done, in a complex, and evil-to-make but doable game, like Democracy, but with far greater granularity and complexity.
If I ever finish my current game, this kind of thing is certainly on my list of stuff to do.