Fig. 1: This figure presents the main and mediation effects in our study.

Path (a) shows the impact of economic policy uncertainty on the social security level. Path (b) shows the impact of the social security level on rural resident consumption expenditures. Path (c) depicts the main effect of economic policy uncertainty on rural resident consumption expenditures. The arrows indicate the direction of the relationships, and the coefficients on each arrow represent the strength of the effects. Besides, ***indicate significance at the 1% level.