system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[Star Wars] How did turning the Republic into the Empire change the galaxy's economic state?
gpt
Massively. The Old Republic wasn't in *debt*, per say, but the economic state was hardly improving by the time of the Clone Wars. Plenty of people were almost glad to see a war, since it meant business. As it turned out, however, the war went on a lot longer and was a *lot* more expensive than pretty much everyone thought (excluding Sidious, of course), so by the time of Palpatine's Declaration of a New Order, you couldn't throw a rock across the senate hall without hitting someone who was deeper in debt than they could possibly repay. 

One of the first things that Sidious did after the end of the war was declare any debts owed to "former Seperatist allies" to be void. This included the Intergalactic Banking Clan, though both the Confederacy and Republic had borrowed heavily from the IGBC to fund their respective war efforts. Though the Banking Clan suffered heavily, it eased some of the fears that the Empire would quickly fail thanks to a postwar depression.

As the Empire's true power became more obvious in the years after the war, they started getting aggressive about centralizing the economy. A new Credit standard was introduced, and smaller industrial firms would have been absorbed into the Imperial engineering corps, or more likely, "encouraged" to be bought out by larger corporations that the Empire had close relations with. Seinar Fleet Systems and Kuat Drive Yards, for example, were massively bolstered in the post-Clone Wars era. They also weren't afraid of intentionally organizing monopolies, either. The Bacta Cartel was an agreement between the Empire,and  Xucphra and Zaltin corporations on Thyferra, which gave the companies exclusive rights to produce Bacta, an essential medical salve used galaxy-wide.

Last, slavery of was made implicitly legal by reclassifying some non-human species as "lower life-forms". This probably had the biggest impact on most Imperial citizens' quality of life, both directly and indirectly.

To summarize, if you were a powerful corporation, you could expect to see higher profit margins, more production, more legal latitude, and the impossibly large military-industrial complex that was the Empire to always order more of what you were selling. As for everyone else, food and other immediate essentials would've slowly gotten more affordable, along with minor luxuries like fancy holosuites, fast speeders, and big houses. For a healthy chunk of the population, you were probably better off than you had been in generations...

Assuming you were human. 

Or weren't living in the outer rim, or anywhere far from "civilization". Or didn't try and even *suggest* opposing anything the Empire was doing.