Counting, equidistribution and entropy gaps at infinity with applications to cusped Hitchin representations

We show that if an eventually positive, non-arithmetic, locally Holder continuous potential for a topologically mixing countable Markov shift with (BIP) has an entropy gap at infinity, then one may apply the renewal theorem of Kessebohmer and Kombrink to obtain counting and equidistribution results. We apply these general results to obtain counting and equidistribution results for cusped Hitchin representations, and more generally for cusped Anosov representations of geometrically finite Fuchsian groups.