Abstract

Geopolitical disruptions at maritime chokepoints cascade through interconnected economic systems, yet the pathways along which such shocks travel and the nodes at which they are absorbed remain poorly understood. The aim of this study is to trace, within a single coupled framework, how the 2026 Strait of Hormuz oil-price shock propagated through Korean-origin aviation demand, Southeast Asian destination tourism, and the macroeconomies of four oil-importing economies, and to identify where and how the shock was absorbed. Treating the disruption as an exogenous perturbation, we follow its diffusion across four interacting nodes: oil prices, Korean-origin aviation demand to Southeast Asian destinations, destination-level tourism flows, and national macroeconomic states. Using a triple-difference design with event-study and placebo-year tests on monthly route-level data, and supported by explicit parallel-trend, control-stability, and route-classification robustness checks, we find that aviation demand to leisure routes contracted by roughly 27%, accompanied by an almost identical fall in flight frequency and an unchanged load factor—a pattern consistent with a market-clearing capacity adjustment. The effect concentrated after the March blockade and stabilized thereafter, suggesting a self-limiting rather than self-amplifying dynamic. Downstream, destination-level arrivals did not contract proportionally, plausibly buffered by source-market substitution that scales with a destination’s market diversification. Along the macroeconomic branch, the same shock co-moved with rising inflation and depreciating currencies, but the magnitude of these responses varied with fuel-pricing and exchange-rate regimes. We interpret these findings as an exploratory, systems-level account in which chokepoint oil shocks act as multi-node propagation-and-absorption processes, where resilience appears to emerge endogenously from market substitution and policy–regime heterogeneity rather than being externally imposed.

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