This article contains erroneous information that has been corrected in a separate news item.
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The ratings company Moody's has kept Finland's credit rating at the top-notch triple-A level, making it one of the few eurozone countries with two such ratings.
The move came just a day after the EU Commission said Finland has the bloc's lowest growth outlook besides Greece.
Heidi Schauman, chief economist at Aktia Bank, says that international institutions still believe in Finland and in the government's austerity measures.
"Strong history"
"There is faith in Finland. We have a strong history. We have always gotten our economy into shape, and there is still confidence in that abroad. There is faith that the government's measures are correct and that Finland will be able to get its economy onto a growth track and its public finances into order," she told Yle.
Markets had expected Moody's to downgrade Finland's rating to AA+. Its economy has yet to return to its 2008 output levels because of a string of setbacks, including the decline of Nokia's former phone business and recession in neighbouring Russia.
Standard & Poor's cut Finland to AA+ back in 2014, and it now posts a negative outlook for that rating. The third major ratings agency, Fitch, still rates Finland's economy AAA, with a negative outlook.
"The sick man of Europe"
Prime Minister Juha Sipilä's centre-right government hopes to rein in public debt growth by pushing for reforms and 10 billion euros of spending cuts by 2030, but its reform program is strongly opposed by labour unions.
Ahead of the announcement, Finnish 10-year yields were 0.7 basis points lower at 0.56 percent on Friday. The gap between their yields and the German equivalent has already spread this year to its widest since Europe's 2012 debt crisis. A downgrade by Moody's would have knocked Finland's debt out of some triple-A bond indexes and forced investors to sell the bonds.
Stuck in recession for four years, Finland was called "the sick man of Europe" by Finance Minister Alexander Stubb last September – just three months after the end of his term as prime minister. His conservative National Coalition Party had led the government since 2011. The country's economy has been hit by the decline of Nokia's phone business as well as EU sanctions imposed on Russia and a resulting tit-for-tat trade embargo.