The article is devoted to the study of such a phenomenon as "digital economy" and is determined by an attempt to understand complex modern economic and legal trends, which are caused by the progressive development of technical and economic relations throughout the world and are characterized by the emergence of many new concepts that significantly enrich the vocabulary of specialists. But it should be noted that this is not a simple appearance of new words, but the latter are gradually turning into normative terms, the essence of which should be understood by both specialists and ordinary citizens, and they should be fixed at the legislative level with a certain meaning, in particular, in special legislation. Thus, the appearance of the term "digital technologies" is gaining more and more popularity and expanding its application, giving rise to more and more new concepts and terms, including the digital economy.
 At the same time, with all the imbalance of modern legislation of Ukraine, legal terminology needs precision in defining concepts and their application with a single meaning. Therefore, this scientific article is devoted to the justification of the activities of legislative bodies and the emphasis is placed on the fact that it is not necessary to quickly create normative acts, apply new terminology and promote such terms as "digital competence" for all persons, since it is first necessary to decide what special knowledge is needed which sectors of the population, specialists and which areas in the digital economy the state should give priority and support to.
 For this purpose, we will analyze various regulatory acts of various departments, analyze dictionaries, which reveal certain terms related to the digital economy, and in particular this term, and express an opinion on how these terms and concepts are consistent with each other. And also analyzed, adopted by the European Parliament and the Council of the EU on May 22, 2018, the Framework program of updated key competences for lifelong learning (2018/C 189/01), in which "digital competence is recognized as one of the eight key competences for a fulfilling life and activity EU citizens".