This paper used endogenous growth theory to apply a dynamic panel GMM model to test the tourism-led growth hypothesis. The data was divided into different categories according to how strong the incentive was to engage in tourism. In addition, specific detailed of countries (income, region) were also used to investigate how important the development of tourism was to economic growth. The empirical resulted indicate that, for African countries, for which GDP was lower while the incentive to engage in tourism was higher than for other countries, the tourism-led growth hypothesis was significantly supported. Therefore, the respective governments should make effort to develop tourism to achieve their economic growth goals. By contrast, there did not exist a tourism-led growth hypothesis when GDP was higher and the incentive to engage in tourism was lower than in other countries. In such cases, the governments could adopt a more conservative tourism policy. The resulted of the study support the endogenous growth theory.