There needs to be a building of some kind that can output a network signal which indicates the economic stats. Growth, Demand, Supply, etc.

Having access to a signal would allow some sort of networked control over how the colony is 'fed' economic items. Take the Supply vs Demand, divide by the value of items, to get how much of a given resource to send to the depo. Without any way to plug these numbers into a signal network this is a very manual process in a game about automating things. The signals wouldn't need to be anything special, just "Output economy demand as X signal" similar to how roboports can tell you the number of construction bots on the network. Everything after that would be up to the player on how to utilize that signal.