Cooperative analysis of infrastructure perfection and residents’ living standards in poverty-stricken counties in Qinghai Province

The western region of China has always been the main battlefield for poverty alleviation. It is essential to explore the interaction mechanism between the infrastructure perfection and residents’ living standards on a small scale to accurately reduce poverty and narrow the gap between the rich and poor residents. Taking poverty-stricken counties in Qinghai Province as the research unit, we constructed a coupling coordination model between infrastructure perfection and living standards to compare and analyze temporal and spatial differentiation patterns. Further, we introduced and improved the barycentric coupling model to analyze the synergistic evolution. The results showed that, from 2002 to 2018, (1) infrastructure perfection and living standards demonstrated an overall growth trend, and spatial agglomeration characteristics were obvious. Counties with better infrastructure perfection and living standards were concentrated in the northeast, and poorer standards were concentrated in southwestern. (2) The degree of coupling coordination changed from the initial antagonistic to coordination coupling, but level of coordination was low, and 50% of counties were still below the medium level. Spatial differentiation was obvious. The development speed of the degree of coupling coordination in the northeast was obviously faster than that in southwest counties, showing a pattern of “high in the northeast and low in the southwest”. (3) Infrastructure perfection played an active role on multidimensional poverty, and poverty reduction of infrastructure was feasible. Spatially, the coupling center of gravity was located in the eastern part of Qinghai Province. Therefore, infrastructure construction in the western should be strengthened in the future.