Economic Health and Economic Investment

I thought I would throw this out there, am at a point where I cant figure out what happened or why it has stayed the same...

Just to give you a little perspective, I started with a economic health score of 6, thinking its early in the year I invested heavily in my trade with both money and recruits, within two turns my economic health score dropped to 4. Two turns after this I asked my trade minister for a trade revenue projection and it showed that my trade revenue grew by 30%, which is great!, so why am I complaining, or even agitated by it.

I am putting this out there to all of you in Agema land to see if you can help me make sense of it.

I have to be honest, after years of playing I've still to quite work out EH. Yours does sound an odd one though-unless through trade income will grow, domestic (taxation) income will go down due to a weak home economy?

That was my thought, even when I asked my ministers they said don't worry, now these are extensions of Richards brain. I forgot to mention I also invested in infrastructure upgrading both, my only thought is due to the amount of money I had spent this year. But I would have thought this would have stimulated my economy.

I believe that trade income is not as associated with EH as taxes are, so you can have some income that's a little more isolated from EH's ups and downs. I also don't think trade investments do much, if anything, for EH.

I think EH is really about your domestic economy, so building roads, canals, covered markets, and things like that locally are the best things to do to improve EH. Other domestic investments that lead to more local jobs would probably help too.

I find the whole thing a black box, honestly. On one of my first turns in game 8, I made the mistake of making an investment that required recruits in brazil, and my recruit pool went negative for a while which seemed to damage my EH as I scrambled to ship some bodies there to fill the gap, and I had to do a fair amount of things to build it back up.

That would make sense Deacon (EH more about domestic economy) and in hindsight makes a lot more sense of income levels I've had in the past...

Does anybody have any sense of the economic or other value of founding new towns? It's rather expensive and time consuming, and I'm not sure of the benefit.