Finland blames Apple for economic decline

The Prime Minister of Finland has accused Apple of taking down two of the country’s largest economic lynchpins.

The Scandinavian country yesterday saw its sovereign debt rating downgraded from AAA to AA+ by ratings agency Standard & Poor.

"We have two champions which went down," PM Alexander Stubb told CNBC. "A little bit paradoxically I guess one could say that the iPhone killed Nokia and the iPad killed the Finnish paper industry, but we’ll make a comeback."

Nokia was previously the country’s largest employer and Finnish firms UPM-Kymmene and Stora Enso are Europe’s largest paper employers. Stubb remains upbeat about the prospects of both industries, however.

"Usually what happens is that when you have dire times you get a lot of innovation and I think from the public sector our job is to create the platform for it,” he added. "We just have to keep at it.”