In the OTU, I believe that it is the interstellar megacorporations rather than the interstellar government which are the dispensers of policy and disincentive. Rather than surviving by being better at competing, they survive by buying out smaller, more innovative competitors. At their level of operation (planning decades in advance, rather than just a couple of quarters or so), stability and predictability matters much more than efficiency.

The Imperial government (at least IMTU) is a shoestring operation which concentrates on only the bare essentials and lets everything else go. The rights of Imperial citizens are not codified so as to leave each individual Imperial High Noble with the highest degree of flexibility in determining how and when to protect these rights. [IMTU only Imperial functionaries, service veterans and travellers from a *different* Imperial world count as "Imperial citizens."] Written Imperial regulations lie almost solely in the realm of commerce, which follows in line with how the Imperial Charter was created first and foremost to encourage and protect interstellar trade.

BTW, I follow the "low trade" model of the Imperium. Interstellar trade is (of itself) not of sufficient volume to be vital to the existence of civilization. But the concept that there should be such trade and that it should be conducted as free from artificial restrictions as possible *is* (again IMTU) vital to the perception of the citizenry that they and their homeworlds are part of a larger entity. Free trade is the lifeflood of the Empire because without it, there is no Empire at all.