Land at last - Criteria for success in South African land redistribution

The black population expected redistribution of land when the apartheid regime fell. However, ther land reform had a rather slow start but the redistribution program is now speeding up. Close to 15.000 households are now receiving grants each year, which is mainly used to buy land which was earlier part of large estates owned by white comercial farmers. The South African Land Reform Program first only benefited poor families, but more successfull entrepreneurs can now recieve grants to as part of the blac k empowerment approach. As land redistribution speeds up, it becomes vital to analyse the experience until now in order to make program as usefull as possible towards it twin ends: (i) poverty aliviation and income restribution and (ii) black empowerment . We will have access to a novel cross section data set from the Quality of Life 2005 survey made by the South African Land Reform Program. It's spesific design with 2000 program beneficiaries and 2000 pairwise "identical" non-beneficiaries opens for val id impact assessment of the program. The large number of observations furthermore makes it possible to single out the caracteristics of the households and communities that have been able to improve their lives through the land grants compared to the less successfull ones. Are the individual caracteristics like education that is most important, or to access to infrastructure, transport and the local institutions and social capital more important? What is the role of regional differences that is already ref lected in the existing income distribution. The results from this econometric analysis is the starting point for a quantitative field studies that will disclose the dynamics of how the significant variables actually affects the results. This will be a s eparate result in itself, and in addition opens for more spesific design of the econometric models in a second iteration.