Besides its headquarter in Hamburg, the HWWI has a branch in Bremen. The institute is organized as a non-profit GmbH; the only shareholder is the Hamburg Chamber of Commerce. The HWWI closely cooperates with Helmut Schmidt University/University of the Armed Forces Hamburg (HSU). As part of this collaboration, the HSU takes over the scientific direction of the HWWI. Additional scientific cooperation partners are Bremen University and the Leibniz University of Applied Sciences Hannover.

In its function as an economic research institute, HWWI provides a platform on which scientists, politicians, entrepreneurs, associations and the interested public can network and identify and discuss future economic challenges and possible solutions.

In its own research, HWWI primarily devotes itself to studying global economic issues, such as the consequences of environmental pollution and climate change, the causes and consequences of international migration flows or the determinants of global economic growth. HWWI is closely connected to its location in Northern Germany by studying how global developments affect Northern Germany in general and Hamburg in particular.

HWWI is committed to evidence-based economic policy. Evidence-based research requires to base economic policy recommendations on empirical analyses rather than on beliefs. In order to do so, HWWI researchers primarily use modern econometric methods from the areas of causal analysis, time series analysis and spatial econometrics.

The HWWI aims at contributing actively to the economic policy debate on the basis of its own research activities in its priority areas of work. To this end, the research results are prepared in such a way that they are easy to understand for the media and the public.