An economic perspective emphasizes the systemic failures that made the Western Roman Empire fiscally unsustainable. The sheer scale of the empire's military needs, coupled with declining productivity and trade, created a vicious cycle of heavy taxation, inflation, and economic contraction. The vast wealth extracted from provinces in the Republican and early Imperial periods began to dry up as conquests ceased and barbarian incursions disrupted trade routes and agricultural production. The focus on short-term fixes, like currency debasement, only accelerated the decline. Historians like Michael Rostov have argued that the very structure of the Roman economy—heavily reliant on slave labor, plunder, and an extractive tax system rather than innovation or broad-based productivity—contained the seeds of its own downfall once expansion ceased. The empire struggled to adapt to new economic realities, clinging to antiquated systems that could no longer support its vast military and administrative overhead, leading to a state that was perpetually bankrupt and unable to effectively respond to external threats or internal crises. This perspective often highlights the divergence between the relatively prosperous East and the struggling West.