A major source of income comes from private entities using your unused spacedocks to build their starships.This means ensuring that your people's privately owned ships are well protected, and that trade with other empires is as open as possible. It is always financially beneficial to arrange things so that a private economy can develop with minimal disruption, even if you can't micromanage the details. These are then taxed by the player's government.

This economy directly simulates a major detail that many games abstract out: the actual physical transportation of resources and people from one point to another (be this within your own economy, or between civilizations) through trade, tourism, emigration, and so on.