At the heart of the structural changes of the Habsburg central and local administration under Maria Theresia lay an economic, or more precisely, a fiscal imperative. Governments in the ancien régime often seemed in a state of permanent penury, leading a hand-to-mouth existence from one financial crisis to another. Waging costly foreign policies motivated by baroque dynastic self-images and mercantilist concepts of international rivalry, governments found that their expenditures were regularly in excess of revenues. The more dramatically dynastic pretensions surpassed the capacity of the respective societies to uphold them – as was the case in the Habsburg conglomerate under Charles VI – the more drastic these fiscal crises became. Since the full mobilization of the state's economic resources in a modern fashion was beyond dynastic governments still encumbered by various feudal contracts and obligations, their prime recourse was to taxes and loans, the raising of which was subject to its own unique difficulties. Securing adequate revenues in the face of these limitations was therefore an ever-present concern. In short, social and political conditions dictated a sort of fiscal obsession.

It did not escape the attention of early modern governments and economists that these fiscal anxieties were ultimately dependent on the strength of the overall economy as much as on their ability to tap these resources. Mercantilists had developed a considerable body of economic theory designed to promote the expansion of the state's commercial and industrial base within a broader ideal of autarky.