Abstract: The purpose of this research is to assess the impact of spatial effects and external factors on the level and dynamics of the Youth Unemployment Rate (YUR) in Russian regions. The analysis based on the panel data for 55 Russian regions in 2002-2013, using four variants of spatial weight matrices. Special attention was focused on the correlation YUR with the distance between a capital and the center of the region. We are used models of unconditional and conditional convergence with spatial effects the dynamics for analysis of youth unemployment.