Services are the leading sector of growth in both mature and catching-up economies. Within the wide-ranging sector of services, tourism represents a strategic industry to foster economic development, based on the stimulus to aggregate demand, to income and to capital inflows. The paper aims at challenging some of the analysis and policy considerations of the tourism-ledgrowth literature. With a razor-blade model, we try to underline how some of the positive effects of tourism are bound to shrink and disappear within particular macroeconomic constraints. Then, we enquire into the evolution of the tourist market in Romania, as a typical case of catching-up economy in European institutional and economic constraints, in order to analyse the concrete risks of strategies based on unmonitored tourism development.