Abstract: Based on the panel data of 1818 counties in 27 provinces of China from 2006 to 2017, this paper focuses on the county regions to study the impact of financial penetration on multidimensional poverty. The findings show that financial penetration can reduce poverty in a multidimensional way by improving the levels of economic development, fiscal revenue, farmers’ income, medical development, etc., in the counties, and this effect is more obvious in poor counties. With the improvement of financial penetration level, the financial institutions in poverty-stricken counties are not playing the role of “blood-drawing machine”, but achieve the effect of multi-dimensional poverty reduction by increasing the access of farmers’ funds; however, it should be noted that this effect should be heterogeneous between poor counties and non-poor counties, for the increase of financial penetration level in non-poor counties will lead to significant outflow of county financial funds, thus poverty reduction will be impaired. Therefore, at present, it is necessary to push the differentiated development of financial inclusion, the poverty-stricken counties should focus on addressing contact exclusion, the non-poverty-stricken counties should focus on the use of utility exclusion, so as to increase farmers’ access to funds and contribute to the realization of the goal of poverty alleviation in 2020.

Key words: financial penetration; multidimensional poverty; “blood pump”; farmer funds gaining