Tobacco products cost the world’s economies more than $1 trillion annually in healthcare expenditures and lost productivity, according to a new report from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the National Cancer Institute (NCI).

The report, which was released Jan. 10, also mentioned there was a “strong possibility” that WHO member states would fail to achieve their goal of a 30 percent relative reduction in tobacco use by 2025.

The report found that manufactured cigarettes account for 92.3 percent of tobacco sales worldwide, but there are other tobacco products such as cigars and smokeless tobacco.

The authors estimated that the number of tobacco-related annual deaths would increase from approximately six million today to eight million by 2030. More than 80 percent of the deaths are expected to occur in low- to middle-income countries, where approximately 80 percent of smokers reside. Today, tobacco use causes 12 percent of deaths among adults 30 years old or older worldwide.

The most prominent diseases linked to smoking include ischemic heart disease, lung cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Approximately 1.1 billion of people worldwide who are 15 and older currently smoke, which is approximately 21 percent of the world’s population. Half of all smokers live in the southeast Asia or Western Pacific regions, while nearly two-thirds of smokers live in 13 countries. Approximately 35 percent of males and 6 percent of females are smokers. There are also approximately 346 million people worldwide who use smokeless tobacco, of which 86 percent live in the southeast Asia region.

Although the prevalence of smoking is decreasing, the number of smokers worldwide is increasing mostly due to population growth, according to the report.

The report’s scientific editors were Frank J. Chaloupka, PhD, an economics professor and director of the health policy center at the University of Illinois at Chicago; Geoffrey T. Fong, PhD, a psychology professor at the University of Waterloo and a senior investigator at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research; and Ayda Aysun Yurelki, PhD, of the Institute for Health Research and Policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

More than 60 authors contributed to the report, and more than 70 reviewers examined the document before the final document was released.

The authors said the least costly tobacco control interventions included significant tobacco tax and price increases, comprehensive bans on tobacco industry marketing activities and health warning labels with pictures prominently displayed.

“High-income countries have succeeded in curbing tobacco consumption by significantly raising tobacco taxes and prices and by employing the tobacco control strategies described in the monograph,” the authors wrote. “However, the majority of tobacco users worldwide today live in [low- to middle-income countries], and in most countries tobacco use is more concentrated in low-income populations. Understanding the effects of tobacco on low-income populations is particularly important for reducing tobacco use and its adverse health consequences.”

The authors added that significant tobacco tax and price increases were also cost-effective, although most governments invest only a fraction of revenues generated by tobacco taxes back into tobacco control or other health programs. For instance, global tobacco excise taxes generated nearly $269 billion in government revenues in 2013-2014, but less than $1 billion of that money was invested in tobacco control.

“The research summarized in this monograph confirms that evidence-based tobacco control interventions make sense from an economic as well as a public health standpoint,” Chaloupka said in a news release.