By the way, in all your gameplay... I think you should make the sides more obvious.
Like this
Law side:
-Police (starting from basic guards, ending with chief of police)
-Recieves upgrades when economy factor is positive.
-Recieves income percent from all legal business.
Outlaw side:
-Mafia (From henchmen to Godfather)
-Recieves small percent income from all illegal businesses.
-Recieves upgrades when economy factor ispositice.
Wealth seekers/busninessmen/ex-neutral side:
-Ordinary people (From average workers to Corporation owners)
-Gets cash from legal or illegal business, can even combine both types.
-Spends it's own cash to get upgrades.
So see, this way the way people interact is more obvious. Plus their would be regular lives for all. Oh, and drug business is ilegal industry.
Now talking about business, these are the types of it:
-Agriculture [Farming and things like that, requires a lot of land to be used, but can be expanded a lot] [The illegal version is Drug dealing] [Pharamceutical counts as this one too, since the ferments or stuff like that will need to be extracted from rare plants or stuff like that, but will require more sophisticared equipment than food farms]
-Souvenirs or any other nonsence [Doesn't require any land to own, can be done anywhere, not so profiting, but this is more like crafting] [Illegal version... well it depends from the items made]
-Weapons [very profiting and expensive] [ileagal or legal, depends to who you sell the weapons]
-Hi-tech/research [Provides goods needed for upgrades and hi-tech expensive equipment for more advanced businesses] [Can also cause events as you said]
-Heavy machinery [provides equipment for advanced businesses] [also responsible for mining, refining gathered resources and vehicle production] [Gives income to both sides, illegal and legal]
-Real Estate [Buying and selling buildings and land to other people and using it as business structures, like shall we say Night clubs and libraries as legal income and public houses and stuff like that as illegal] [Also it effects not only how it's used, but to who it's sold. Like cops and mafia can use it for their own purposes]