He has contributed to such periodicals as Forbes, The Economist, and The Wall Street Journal, and since 1987 has been the executive director of the Fernand Braudel Institute of World Economics, based in São Paulo, Brazil.
During this period he reported from many countries in the Caribbean, Central America, and South America, and wrote articles and reviews for such publications as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, The Baltimore Sun, Newsday, The Economist, The New York Review of Books, Commentary, The New Republic, The Nation, The New Leader, The Observer, the New Statesman, and The Wilson Quarterly.
He was also published in a number of non-English-language publications in Europe and the Americas, such as O Estado de S. Paulo, El País, Le Monde, and Die Zeit.
Between 1974 and 1977, on leave from AUFS and holding the title of Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Gall conducted a three-year research project on the emergence of Brazil as a force in hemispheric affairs.
To an unusual extent he has devoted himself to very long-form articles, often spending months visiting a country or region and producing almost book-length essays that provide detailed reportage as well as extensive analysis and commentary.
In the 1960s he wrote hundreds of articles for major publications about such topics as education in rural Puerto Rico, labor trouble on the San Juan waterfront, small factories in the Puerto Rican town of Aibonito, poverty in the Puerto Rican interior, guerrillas in Colombia, economic development in Bolivia, mining in Bolivia, violence in Nicaragua, the Duvalier regime in Haiti, political assassinations in the Dominican Republic, Maoist guerrillas in Peru, guerrillas in Venezuela, guerillas in Guatemala, church-state relations in Castro's Cuba, the detention of Juan Perón in Rio de Janeiro, and social tensions in Ciudad Juarez.
(August 15, 1983), argued that "Mexico's chronic water shortage threatens to limit further economic development and to greatly decrease its self-sufficiency in food production."
Gall noted that while other nations in Latin America had struggled with many of the same problems as Venezuela, they had nonetheless "adhered to the path of democratic continuity and reform, while Chávez seeks to revive archaic forms of populism and military dictatorship."
[5] In 2007, Gall wrote a portrait of São Paulo, noting that "For the first time in history, majority of the world's population now lives in cities," and that "the names of vast new megacities – Dhaka, Lagos, Calcutta, Jakarta – are synonymous with human misery.
Its residents are regularly shocked by corruption, prison revolts, failing public education, truck hijackings, armed robberies, and murders at traffic lights.
"[6] Over the past three decades he has warned of the dangers embedded in the global proliferation of financial assets, first in a long cover story for Forbes "Recycling Petrodollars: How Much More Can the System Take?"
Indeed, maintained Gall, "Water shortages may prove to be far more important for China's future than the scandals and power struggles inside the Communist Party leadership that recently captured international attention."
Its hugely popular president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, now in his last months in office, seemed set to retire with a chorus of praise – until he plunged into the complications of deep-water oil.
Just as Icarus saw his wings of wax melt as he flew too close to the sun, so Mr Lula is risking his legacy as controversies multiply over his petroleum policies.
"[10] On July 26, 2012, Gall was one of the speakers at "Brazil: Midyear Economic and Political Outlook", an event in New York sponsored by the Brazilian American Chamber of Commerce.
In the last decade, Gall has bridged the worlds of journalism and scholarship as the founder and creator of the São Paulo-based Fernand Braudel Instituto de Economia Mundial, where he writes and publishes in-depth reports in English, Portuguese and Spanish.