Measuring Spatiotemporal Changes of Rural Basic Public Service in Poverty-stricken Area of China

To address the development of rural basic public services (RBPS) among contiguous destitute areas of China, we develop a comprehensive RBPS evaluation methodology to examine RBPS development level of 728 poverty-stricken counties, using geographical information system (GIS) to describe their multiscale and multidimensional spatiotemporal change during 2010-2012; besides, we also try to reveal how RBPS interacts with county economy (CE) by integrating Tapio model and weighted Voronoi circle-layer structure. Our results show that (1) at a multiscale of area-province-county, in spite of the overall low level, RBPS is steadily growing during 2010-2012, along with a positive spatial autocorrelation and an obvious nonequilibrium that is high in east China but low in west; however, the RBPS gaps among the whole counties are gradually narrowing, shifting their development grades from a mostly relative shortage or relatively severe shortage in 2010 to a main state of relatively richness or relatively equilibrium in 2012, (2) from a multidimensional view, the RBPS gaps among most dimensions of different areas are gradually narrowing, except for the dimension of social public safety service that shows a significant regional differentiation among different areas. RBPS in Tibetan areas is the most unequalled and falls into the most obvious heterogeneity, and (3) there exist weak correlations between county-level original RBPS and original CE for each year and each circle layer, while significantly positive correlation is found only between mean RBPS and mean CE for four circle-layer subsets of counties, respectively; overall, RBPS development level lags behind that of CE as a main result of the weak decoupling between them. This study may provide a good understanding of the status, regional differences, and evolution of RBPS in poverty-stricken rural China, and serves as a scientific reference regarding decision-making in both promoting intrarural antipoverty harmonious development and constructing the new countryside of China.