"But there's no centralized measurements of how well the whole economy is doing.  Cheliax literally does not know its GDP and has no way of finding out.  All it has are the amount of taxes it collects from the subhierarchy, and whatever verification structures must exist in order to verify how much the taxes - does the system have any way of knowing whether a Baron is just lying about how much tax they extracted from the people underneath, or is it all trust-based?  Trust-based doesn't sound like it should work in Golarion, and wouldn't even be tried in Civilization."

"But there's no centralized measurements of how well the whole economy is doing, it sounds like.  Cheliax literally does not know its GDP and has no way of finding out.  All it has are the amount of taxes it collects from the subhierarchy, and whatever verification structures must exist in order to verify how much the taxes - does the system have any way of knowing whether a Baron is just lying about how much tax they extracted from the people underneath, or is it all trust-based?  Trust-based doesn't sound like it should work in Golarion, and wouldn't even be tried in Civilization."