SUMMARYWomen's land rights are increasingly put forth as a means to promote development by empowering women, increasing productivity, and improving welfare. However, little empirical research has evaluated these claims. This paper uses the 2001 Nepal Demographic and Health Survey to explore whether women's land rights empower women and benefit young children's health in Nepal. The results provide support for both of these hypotheses. Women who own land are significantly more likely to have the final say in household decisions, a measure of empowerment. Similarly, children of mothers who own land are significantly less likely to be severely underweight.

An effective protected area system is essential for the long-term conservation of Myanmar's biodiversity. This study examined the attitudes of 2915 residents in 97 communities around three protected areas (PAs) in upper Myanmar: Alaungdaw Kathapa National Park in the western mountains, Htamanthi Wildlife Sanctuary in the hills bordering the Chindwin and Uru rivers, and Chatthin Wildlife Sanctuary in the central dry zone. Logistic regression indicated a positive attitude toward the PAs was most highly correlated with a perception of conservation benefits and benefits resulting from management of the areas. Attitude was also significantly correlated with a perception of extraction benefits, conflicts with PA staff and crop damage by wildlife. Socioeconomic variables were less powerful than perceptions in predicting attitude and, unlike perceptions, their effects varied among the areas. The much greater effect of perceptions, especially positive ones, on people's attitudes indicates that understanding perceptions is important to improving the relationship between local residents and these PAs. This finding underscores the fact that a focus on conflicts to understand people's attitudes toward PAs may undervalue or miss critical positive perceptions that people hold. Understanding local residents' perceptions of PAs makes possible the creation of strategic, place-based management strategies that build on people's positive perceptions and mitigate their negative perceptions.

Using data from interviews with matched couples recorded in the 2001 Nepal Demographic and Health Survey, this report explores how incorporating both spouses' reports of household decisionmaking may change the understanding of the determinants and consequences of women's autonomy. Results indicate that a substantial proportion of couples disagree about who makes household decisions, but the determinants of women's autonomy are still largely similar according to both spouses'reports. The assessment of the effects of two important sources of autonomy--women's education and employment--differs significantly between spouses, however. When spouses agree that the wife is autonomous, the association between her autonomy and her use of health-care services is found to be substantially stronger than when spouses disagree about her autonomy. This finding suggests that the association between women's autonomy and health-care-service use may be underestimated when only women's reports are considered.

Drawing on a uniquely large number of items on marital quality, this study explores the determinants of marital quality in Chitwan Valley, Nepal. Marital quality is measured with five dimensions identified through exploratory factor analysis, including satisfaction, communication, togetherness, problems, and disagreements. Gender, education, and spouse choice emerge as the most important determinants of these dimensions of marital quality. Specifically, men, those with more schooling, and those who participated in the choice of their spouse have higher levels of marital quality. By contrast, caste, occupation, age at marriage, marital duration, and number of children have little to no association with marital quality. While gender, education, and spouse choice emerge as key determinants of marital quality in this context, the majority of variation in marital quality remains unexplained.

This article evaluates whether arranged marriage declined in India from 1970 to 2012. Specifically, the authors examine trends in spouse choice, the length of time spouses knew each other prior to marriage, intercaste marriage, and consanguineous marriage at the national level, as well as by region, urban residence, and religion/caste. During this period, women were increasingly active in choosing their own husbands, spouses meeting on their wedding day decreased, intercaste marriage rose, and consanguineous marriage fell. However, many of these changes were modest in size and substantial majorities of recent marriages still show the hallmarks of arranged marriage. Further, instead of displacing parents, young women increasingly worked with parents to choose husbands collectively. Rather than unilateral movement towards Western marriage practices, as suggested by theories of family change and found in other Asian contexts, these trends point to a hybridization of customary Western and Indian practices.