With the development and openness of economy and society, inbound tourism has become an important part of national economy and has driven macro-economic growth by promoting the related industrial development. The driving effect of inbound tourism on economic growth has time-varying effect, on the one hand, the development quality of inbound tourism itself and its association with the related industries are correlated with economic development level, with the improvement of regional economic development level, its driving effect on economic growth is stronger. On the other hand, inbound tourism belongs to resource-type dependent (export) industry, with its improving of the status and proportion in national economy, it faces resource curse difficulty, especially its crowding out effect on the manufacturing industries with stronger driving effect is not conducive to overall economic growth and further its driving effect on economic growth tends to weaken. Based on panel data from 107 countries and regions in the world from 1995 to 2017, the study takes the degree of inbound tourism specialization (the proportion of international tourism revenue to GDP) as the threshold variable and uses the threshold panel model to conduct an empirical test on the relationship between inbound tourism and economic growth. The study finds that, with the improving of income level, the driving effect of inbound tourism on economic growth is gradually increasing, whether in high income countries and regions or in middle income countries and regions or low income countries and regions, the driving effect of inbound tourism on economic growth overall gradually weakens with the promotion of the specialization degree of inbound tourism. Thus, we should use the high quality development of inbound tourism to push forward the formation of domestic and international double-circulation new development pattern, actively use the paths such as new-style tourism resources development, technological innovation and so on to effectively improve the driving effect of inbound tourism on economic growth, meanwhile, maintain the balanced relationship between tourism industry and other industries and avoid the unfavorable impact of excessive inbound tourism development on economic growth.