restitution program is heavily biased in favor of urban areas which account for more than 90% of the cases lodged.

A program of _redistributive land reform_ was established with the aim of providing opportunities for the large number of black households who wanted to gain access to land but did not have specific documentation to enter the restitution program nor were eligible to benefit from tenure reform. The general principle of the program is to provide a grant, equal to the maximum subsidy under the National housing program (R 16,000 or about US $ 2,500) that would allow poor households to acquire land plus associated productive infrastructure in the regular market. While this was not expected to be sufficient to establish an independent agricultural operation, it was designed to provide the start-up funds for such an enterprise, to be complemented from other sources. Recognizing the limitations on the first two programs, the Government set very ambitious targets for land redistribution - aiming to transfer 30% of South Africa's 99.07 million hectare farmland, or 29.72 million hectares, between 1994 and 1999. After three years of operation, about 200,000 hectares of land have been transferred to about 20,000 households, representing 0.6% of the target, and 0.2% of the households demanding land.

The second, and quantitatively most important, element of the RDP is the old age pension program. This is an enormous program under which the Department of Welfare pays social grants on a monthly basis to 1.6 million beneficiaries. The payments made under the pension scheme are relatively large, accounting for 22% of rural incomes and 28% of income for the poorest groups. As illustrated in Table 2, the annual cost of this program in 1997/98 (with an exchange rate of about 4 R per US $) amounted to more than US $ 1.5 billion. Evaluations, most of them based on the 1993 SALDRU data, suggest that the program provided a significant source of income, on a reliable and non-discriminatory (e.g. gender) basis to remote areas, reaching predominantly the poor and therefore being an effective tool for redistribution (Case and Deaton 1996). Two-thirds of pensions go to rural areas. Given that sixty percent of African households with pensioners are three generation households with children present, pensions may have considerable spillover effects and the pension system could be seen as an effective tool to provide income to households where poor children live. Roughly a third of all children below age of four are in households receiving pensions, and the percentage of children living with pensioners is higher in the poorer quintiles (Stats SA, 1997). It has been shown that pensions that accrue to women (but not to men) significantly reduce stunting of children in the recipient households (Duflo 1999).

The third program is the national housing subsidy scheme, administered through Provincial Housing Boards, which provides a once-off capital subsidy for land, housing and infrastructure to those beneficiaries earning less than R3,500 per month. The subsidy scheme represents a compromise between popular demands for the state to deliver complete houses for all and a concern to spread housing benefits 9