Norman Gall

Norman Gall (born September 17, 1933) is an American reporter and commentator on Latin American affairs. 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.

Gall was born in the Bronx, New York, on September 17, 1933, and was educated at New York City public schools and at New York University, from which he received an A.B. in 1956.

From 1961 to 1964, Gall served as a reporter and Caribbean correspondent for the English-language Puerto Rican newspaper The San Juan Star .

From 1964 to 1971, he worked a freelance journalist specializing in Latin American affairs, receiving support from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Creole Foundation, the Institute of Caribbean Studies, the University of Puerto Rico (via a Ford Foundation grant), and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. 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.

From 1971 to 1978, Gall was employed by the American Universities Field Staff (AUFS), based in Caracas and São Paulo. During this time he did reporting, gave lectures, and conducted research on Venezuela, Dominican Republic, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Chile and Brazil. 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. From 1980 to 1987, Gall was a Contributing Editor of Forbes magazine, specializing in global economic developments, with a focus on Latin America. Since 1987, he has been executive director of the Fernand Braudel Institute of World Economics in São Paulo and editor of its newspaper of research and opinion, Braudel Papers, which is published in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. His latest Braudel Papers essay, The Happy Land: Brazil's institutions face the music (2014), stresses Brazil's need for a new strategy to overcome problems of economy and society that threaten to undermine the advances of recent decades.

Gall has worked over the years as a consultant to the Exxon Corporation (in 1979), to the World Bank (in 1984-85 and 1989–90), to the United Nations (in 1985), and to Technoplan (in 1993). A resident of Puerto Rico (1961–67) and of Venezuela (1968-74), Gall has lived in Brazil since 1977.

Gall was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1968 to study Iberian and Latin American History. He was a Visiting Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University from 1967 to 1968 and from 1972 to 1973. In 2010, he was awarded the Maria Moors Cabot prize, the world's oldest international award for journalism, by the Columbia University School of Journalism. The School of Journalism, in announcing the prize, noted that “Norman Gall has been reporting on the Americas for half a century. He covered the devastation of the Amazon in the 1970s, the vulnerabilities of Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party regime in the 1980s and, more recently, the institutional weaknesses revealed in Brazil by a major corruption scandal that shook President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s government in 2005. 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.” The award citation praised Gall's "half a century of reporting, analysis and commentary on the Americas... unparalleled in its breadth, reach and quality."

Gall is married to Catalina Pagés Lamas and has two children, Sarah (born 1971) and Jonathan (born 1974).