Also, of the land reform beneficiaries, 32% had access to pensions, and 6% reported to have earlier accessed the housing grant.<sup>8</sup> To put the characteristics of land reform beneficiaries in perspective, it would be desirable to compare them to those of the country as a whole. For the variables that are available in both surveys, such a comparison can be undertaken using the SALDRU survey. In doing so one has to bear in mind that, with limitations in variable coverage? and an absence of reliable recall data, the ability to make systematic inferences on beneficiaries pre-project status is limited essentially to infrastructure access. Nonetheless, probit regression for land reform participation performed on the combined sample of land reform beneficiaries and the rural non-white part of the 1993 SALDRU survey' suggest that, even within this group, the program was well targeted. The fact that land reform beneficiaries had systematically worse infrastructure access than non-beneficiaries within the target group clearly allows to reject the hypothesis that program benefits are appropriated by non-poor or non-eligible beneficiaries.

Detailed results are presented in table 4. As illustrated in equation (1), land reform beneficiaries' access to social infrastructure is significantly below that of even the remainder of the rural non-white population. Limited access to water and bad roads stand out. Similarly, they are far more distant from good roads than the population average and much more likely to have no toilet. In addition, they have more people in higher age and a lower dependency ratio, with the number of persons aged between 14 and 60 being marginally significant. While the head's age is highly significant, education is not. The high significance of provincial dummies points towards large differences across provinces in the extent of land reform implementation. Adding household assets (in equation 2) indicates that, as noted earlier, land reform beneficiaries are more likely to have access to farm animals (cattle and poultry) as well as electricity, as noted from the descriptive analysis.

All of this suggests that, contrary to land reform programs in other countries such as Brazil which seem to reach the relatively better off within the poor (Buinainain et al. 1999), mis-targeting is not an issue in South Africa. This leads to the issue of land reform projects' economic viability and the characteristics of economically successful ventures.

s The data do not allow to determine whether this actually reflected that beneficiaries had accessed the grant twice or, as is more likely, they had confused the land purchase grant with the housing grant and interviewers were not sufficiently alert to seek further clarification on this.

> 9 For example, the SALDRU survey does not contain information on whether or not the household benefited from other govemment programs.

> 10 As both the white rural or the non-with urban population are far better off than non-white people, their inclusion obviously would greatly strengthen the results reported here. In view of the fact that the target group is restricted to the non-white population, we refrain from doing so, noting that the above results imply that the program is well-targeted to the poor even within this group.

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