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The Chinese central government has consistently taken decisive legal and policy measures over the past 35 years to secure, enhance, and expand farmers’ rights to farmland and forest land in order to reduce the gap in income and consumption between urban citizens and their counterparts in mountainous forest areas. While encouraging development of a forest land rights market to facilitate market allocation of resources, these legal rules and policy directives have particularly emphasized protecting farmers’ forest land rights and their property interests when such land rights are subject to acquisition by powerful enterprises.

Past studies have shown that women’s land ownership in India can have multiplier impacts on women’s social status, reduction of violence on women, familial gender equity and increase in productivity. Inheritance is the overwhelming way land is acquired in India, but societal practices exclude women from inheriting land