In the Paris Declaration, donors undertook to provide reliable, indicative pledges of aid over a multi-year span, and to disburse aid in a timely and predictable fashion according to agreed schedules.  Predictable aid enables partner countries to manage their public finances and plan their development expenditure.  Donors also commit to ensuring that at least 85% of their assistance is reported on the budget. 

This is an area where donors have been performing rather poorly.  In its Global Monitoring Report 2005, the World Bank found that aid tends to be more volatile than domestic revenues, and that aid volatility has increased over the last decade.  The 2006 OECD Survey set an apparently high baseline of 88% of aid reported on budget, and 70% of aid disbursed according to annual schedules.  However, there are reasons to be cautious of these figures, as over- and under-reporting and disbursement cancel each other out, resulting in an artificially high baseline.  For the majority of countries and most donors, performance is considerably below this level.