Oh, absolutely something needs to be done about the lack of -Econ (and -Sec) states compared with 3.3 ... but I'm not convinced pinning all the non-production economies to Famine is the solution. (Except for the ones no-one ever trades with, which are in Econ: None instead)
And certainly not in a way that means importing food makes the famine worse. Obviously there has to be a lot of abstraction and breaks from realism to make things work as a game, but I think you'd need to change the state's name to "Overfed" at that point ... there's too much food, so everyone is having banquets and parties rather than working, until it's been eaten.
Service (which is mostly fairly rare, of course, as a primary economy type) should be getting a lot of income from providing those services - but other than maybe the occasional courier mission, this isn't currently modelled in-game as it doesn't really involve the players.
Tourism should be getting a lot of income from visiting tourists - perhaps passively drawing +Econ from neighbouring systems? - but half the tourist missions to a lot of these systems scan the beacon only, so don't touch the local factions at all.
Colony presumably make their money from the rental income from the residents - who themselves make their money working elsewhere. Again, other than a few passenger missions, mostly out of scope of the player-touched bits of the economy.
Terraforming, yes, probably is just a big pit to throw money down in the hope that it'll get a big payoff when the atmosphere is breathable and you can start opening facilities there on the land you bought up cheap with terraforming bonds. That one probably should require the faction to have other sources of +Econ to support it. This is actually an area where the 3.3 states don't work so well, I think - a faction can theoretically be in Investment in one system and Famine a few LY away, which is a bit weird - and means it can't model the funding for terraforming very well.
EDIT: agreed with your edit that the non-production economies need an overhaul - not necessarily to make them produce commodities, but to bring the service side of the economy into being something that the players can interact with in the BGS as much as the commodity side.
So, around and about doing things right now, but a few things crossed my mind which are relevant to this discussion.
- I don't believe donation missions for credits should exist... rather it should function like FE2 where you can donate as much, and however much as you like... and the effect is (caps notwithstanding) to increase economy and rep... not influence. Corollary: I tend to agree with your comment that buying commodities should be rep-neutral.
- In the case of colonies... honestly, these feel like the unloved children anyway... if I were to try anything with them, it would be to have them offer random commodities on the market... fixed for that location, but random across the galaxy... so you might stumble on a colony that has a really cheap and good supply of gold and battle weapons, which just happens to tie in well with the Military outpost in that system... or another colony might sell Narcotics, which is a good-to-know because the local Agricultural economy keeps selling out to the usual trader waves.
- Tourism as an economy... I would stab that as a unique circumstance where selling goods is actually +econ rather than -econ, as the whole point is, generally, resale to the tourist industry. Of course... selling to supply should still be problematic because you're undercutting local providers.
- Military would be the home of a military career-path, if it existed.
I still think certain economy types
should be drains on the economy, such as colony and, where they're the only economy in the system,
should be pegged to Famine almost perpetually (except for famine making food sales become +econ), but happy to agree that I'm purely motivated by the utter lack of negative states and the dire need to fix that. Anything would be better than the nothing which is currently in place.
