Surprised? Let me attempt to demystify this state of affairs.
Jita is the central tradehub for all of New Eden, essentially. It has the highest availability of goods and is the highest frequented market by buyers and sellers. Because of it’s central location, it can be accessed with relative ease by all factions. That is why this tradehub is setting the standard price for all goods.
This ease of access is, why all other tradehubs can not develop separate economies from Jita.
Why? Because if an item is really expensive in any of the other trade hubs, then the people will simply travel to Jita and buy it. Similiarly, if it’s way too cheap, people will buy it and then sell it in Jita.
It is too big and too close to be ignored.
Items in other trade hubs are generally a bit more expensive though. That’s because the sellers there are charging you with a convenience fee. Yes, you could fly over to Jita and buy it at the cheapest price. But that’s a hassle. If you pay just a little bit extra, you can have it right now.
So, essentially, trading in the other hubs boils down to finding the highest possible pricehike that you can put on the Jita price, before the people just move over to Jita.
If you really wanted to have independent trade hubs, you would need to seriously destroy the current means of travelling to Jita. It would have to be akin of separating all faction spaces with a REALLY BIG low / null sec zone, and you’d have to do something about jump freighters and other means of teleporting around space, so you couldn’t just bypass everything so easily. Only then will you have separate economies from Jita.
Now just for the record, I’m not making any comment about whether that would be a good or bad thing. I’m just pointing out what conditions would have to be met, before you could get radically different prices compared to Jita.
Also, I’m making all these statements as a mere layman in this matter. If you’re interested in a complete hardcore deepdive into the world of EVE economics, have a chat with @The_Oz, or visit his youtube channel. You’ll very quickly have a very solid grasp on how things work over here.
With economic regards
-James Fuchs