The Neither Economy: Travel’s Big Blind Spot

The UN has published its annual Economic and Social Survey of Asia and the Pacific — all 200 pages — and I read it on a long-haul flight, because I'm that person. The report is genuinely good on the macro picture: APAC growth slowing to 4% in 2026, the Iran war rippling through oil, freight, and currency markets, and a serious policy argument for demand-led growth built on regional consumption rather than exports to the West. It covers remittances, labor mobility, tourism, trade, digital payments, social protection.

Still, I kept coming back to the same person: a Filipino nurse who works in Dubai. She sends $400 home every month, flies to Manila twice a year through a Gulf hub, has no portable social security, and when the Iran war disrupted Gulf aviation on Feb 28, it hit her ability to send money home and fly home in the same week. The report covers all four of those issues in four separate sections as four separate policy problems.

But there is a great wa