American cigarette sales are expected to decrease by ______ by the end of the decade.

American cigarette sales are expected to decline by about 15 percent by the end of the decade, a reflection of the move to ban public smoking in most of the United States. Sales in Western Europe and other industrialized countries are also expected to drop.

With 1.2 billion people and the world’ s fastest growing economy, China is the most coveted target of the multinational tobacco companies. Cigarettes consumption, calculated as the number of cigarettes smoked per adult, has increased by 7 percent each year over the last decade in China. There are 300 million smokers in China, more people than the entire population of the United States, and they buy 1.6 trillion cigarettes a year.