Piergiorgio Mossi

SUMMARY For several years it has become the practice of Public Administration quality assessment as part of the institutional activities carried out by offices to improve public services by monitoring the production process. The Ministry of Labour and Social Policies has adopted a system of ‘‘quality assessment’’ based on indicators selected as representative of the inspection carried out in decentralized offices. This scoring system – called Project Quality – is defined by three ‘‘synthetic indicators’’ determined periodically by the 92 Provincial Labour Directorates (in Italian: Direzioni Provinciali del Lavoro – DPL) operating in the country. It does indeed have a rating system that defines a ranking among the offices. This paper presents the results of the research in order to analytically describe the performance level with a different model and also suggesting the possible influence exerted by ‘‘local context variables’’, i.e., those relating to the geo-socio-economic differentials, in explaining the efficiency of inspection. The data are analyzed according to the variable inspection and local was formalized through a second-order structural equations model. Keywords: PLS Path-Modeling, Second Order Latent Variables, Performance Evaluation, Context Variables; Inspection Activity.