Backup war industry

[Tjuk]

Playing as a small nation with a low starting literacy (Serbia, Greece, etc.) economic flexibility is limited. Industry needs to make maximal use of available bonuses (capitalist, clercks, locally produced input, operating close to capacity to minimize maintenance) to remain competitive while dealing with low prestige and lagging tech. This makes the economy highly susceptible to sudden changes in supply and demand. When a great war breaks out, taxes are widely being raised and demand for consumer goods crashes, while normally unprofitable military goods go into highd demand.

Some of the methods I use to fortify my economy against such events are:

• Stockpiling military goods when they are cheap for later use during peace time,
• Saving money to be able to run subsidy based deficit for a couple of years,
• Enacting unemployment reforms to avoid emmigration during employment crisises,
• Keeping laissez faire parties out of power or at least maintaining the option to appoint a party when needed.

I was just wondering if it is might be good idea to maintain some low level military industry, ration factories and such, during peace time, to reduce some of the difficulties during war time. If a factory is subsidized and unproffitable, will it keep hiring new employees to the detriment of more proffitable factories and the budget, or will the workers switch to factories that might actually sell their products.

Instead of subsidizing a factory, could you just buy the produced goods into your stockpile instead of letting them go to waste and sell them later on when the market has improved? What does actually happen to goods that are not sold?

What do you guys think?

 

[unmerged(748229)]

Those are all good ideas if you can afford them.

Regarding industry, I believe that subsidized factories and profitable factories will probably gain employees at the same rate... you might need to run a test of this. But, in any case, you can make sure that profitable factories maintain their employees by giving them a higher priority to hire new workers.

 

[El Jojo]

Unsold goods disappear.
Stockpiling is a good idea, but it's tedious to do it to keep an industry going, you'd need to up your stockpile limit every month.
State capitalism is nice because not only can you set priorities to factories, I seem to remember that capitalists can't destroy a factory so you can go as far as closing your war industry in peace time and reopening it in wartime, coupled with the closing of other factories you can switch to a war economy.

Still you'll have to consider that sometimes inputs will be a problem, during a great war iron may be hard to come by, as steel and sulfur, so you may end up being unable to produce much armamements unless you've secured some good sources.