Which has been the worst performing economy in Europe this year, excluding Greece? The surprising answer is Finland. In the third quarter of this year, Finland’s economy contracted by 0.6%, putting it on course for a possible fourth consecutive year of recession. Since 2008, its output has shrunk by 6%, faring only slightly better than Italy’s roughly 8% decline over the same period.

This might seem an odd record for a country whose sovereign debt still enjoys the rare accolade of a Triple-A rating, whose government debt-to-GDP ratio remains a relatively modest 62%, and which didn’t experience a banking bust. Finland is ranked by the World Economic Forum among the top 10 most competitive economies in the world, and its governments have taken a consistently hard line toward eurozone crisis countries. Now it looks increasingly like a stressed economy itself. How has this happened?

The simplistic answer is to blame the euro, which hardly helped the country deal with a series of shocks in recent years: the implosion of Nokia , Finland’s biggest employer; the collapse of the paper industry, reflecting the decline of newspapers and the bursting of the commodity bubble; the euro crisis and the European Union’s Russian sanctions regime, which hit Finland’s biggest export markets. The cumulative result is that Finland’s export market share has shrunk by a third since 2008, wiping out what was a large current-account surplus and accounting for much of the decline in growth.

If Finland had retained its own currency, it could have responded to these shocks by devaluing to regain competitiveness, as it did in the aftermath of its financial crisis in the 1990s. The U.K. and Sweden, which did devalue in the early stages of the 2008 global financial crisis, have seen GDP rise by 6% and 8% respectively since then. In contrast, Finland has been forced to attempt a painful internal devaluation, trying to regain competitiveness by forcing down labor costs through wage cuts and austerity. Paavo Vayrynen, a former foreign minister and now a member of the European Parliament, has collected 50,000 signatures for a petition demanding that the Finnish parliament debate whether the country should exit the euro.

But this explanation doesn’t tell the whole story. First, it is easy to exaggerate the role devaluation played in the British and Swedish recoveries. The U.K. recovery began only as its substantial postcrisis devaluation started to reverse. In a world of increasingly open economies and interconnected supply chains, the benefits of devaluations aren’t clear-cut, potentially pushing up manufacturing costs and depressing consumer demand. Conversely, two of the fastest-growing economies in the EU now are Ireland and Spain, both of which are in the eurozone.