The world's principal shipbuilding economies have launched negotiations at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) on ways to counter over-capacity and plunging prices in the ailing world shipbuilding industry. Current levels of over-capacity, estimated at around 15 percent, are largely the result of subsidies and other forms of government support measures that have allowed shipyards that would otherwise have gone bankrupt to continue to operate. The result has been to push new ship prices to artificially low levels, as many shipyards reduce their prices to below economic levels in order to attract the business needed to keep their workforces employed.