The method of radial basis function (RBF) is popularly used in the solution of partial differential equations (PDEs). We propose a multiple-scale MQ-RBF method to solve the linear elliptic PDEs and the corresponding inverse Cauchy problems in simply- and doubly-connected domains, where the multiple scales are automatically determined a priori by the collocation points and source points, which play a role of post-conditioner of linear system to determine the unknown expansion coefficients. In the solution of inverse Cauchy problems the multiple-scale MQ-RBF is quite accurate and stable against large noise level up to 10-30%. Even for a case with only a quarter of boundary being imposed over-specified data, the multiple-scale MQ-RBF can still recover 75% unknown data very well. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.