China's leaders are considering a nationwide smoking ban in public, a leading health official said on Wednesday, as the country's tobacco-related health and economic costs continue to mount.

Yang Jie, deputy director of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention's Office of Tobacco Control, said China's cabinet was mulling over a regulation that would ban smoking in public places nationwide. "Optimistically," he said, it could be implemented within a year.

"If you look at the general development of legislation, I don't think there are a lot of problems," he said at a briefing about the health costs of tobacco use in China. "What is most troubling is how to enforce the law effectively."

China is home to more than 300 million smokers – a third of the global total – and produces nearly half of the world's cigarettes, according to official statistics.

Smoking-related diseases cause more than a million deaths in the country a year, and experts expect the number to nearly triple by 2030. Smoking is deeply ingrained in the country's business culture; cigarettes are doled out as a token of respect and given as gifts on formal occasions, especially outside of major cities, where there is no social stigma against smoking anywhere, at any time.

Efforts at tobacco control in the country have been largely ineffective. One of the biggest barriers to progress is political. The Chinese government owns the country's tobacco industry, and 7-10% of its annual revenue – about 600bn yuan (£60.3bn) in 2011 – comes from tobacco sales. China's premier, Li Keqiang, oversees the country's public health policy; his younger brother, Li Keming, runs the country's state-owned tobacco monopoly.

"The most important thing is to take tobacco control away from the tobacco industry," Judith Mackay, a senior advisor to the World Lung Foundation, said at the briefing. "That's a really important structural change that will have to happen before, quite honestly, anything happens in China."

Since China signed the World Health Organisation framework convention on tobacco control in 2003 – a treaty designed "to protect present and future generations from the devastating … consequences of tobacco consumption" – the country's tobacco production has risen dramatically, from 1.75tn cigarettes a year a decade ago to about 2.58tn in 2012. China's health ministry has banned smoking in a variety of public places, but lacks the power to enforce its laws.

"China's years of anti-smoking efforts have had almost no results," China's official newswire Xinhua said last Wednesday, after the figures were released.

Yet Mackay said the government's attitude towards tobacco control was changing. China's Central Party School has completed a 200-page research paper suggesting that the country adopt a tougher stance on smoking, she said.

The president, Xi Jinping, led the research institution until January, and Mackay said the study was conducted under his watch.

In an interview, Mackay recalled a conversation last year with one of the study's nine co-authors, Zhang Zhongjun.

"He said that there are a million jobs lost per year because a million people die from tobacco," she said.

"That's the first time in China that I've seen this economic understanding, that the economic balance is definitely in favour of health."