Policy makers therefore need to carefully consider their own particular economic structures when considering the distributional effects of their policies. However, in general, all policies including direct regulation will have some distributional impact which can often be regressive. For example, Sutherland (2006) argues that appliance energy efficiency standards usually affect market choices by removing the low-end and less energy-efficient units from the market. Comparatively wealthy consumers apparently purchase about the same appliances as they would in the absence of energy efficiency standards, and hence suffer minimal losses.