ABSTRACT
Devaluations were especially useless when full employment was in full swing. Finland, a small but highly sophisticated economy, recognised as early as the sixties that devaluation can give rise to a bonanza in export profits. A country's total exports are provided by numerous firms with diverse business operations. A large number may urgently lobby for a substantive devaluation while others want no devaluation and some could conceivably prefer a revaluation. In 1967 the markka was devalued by 23.8 per cent. Lest the corporate sector undeservedly benefited from this substantive fluke, Finnish goods were subjected to a special export levy. In the foreign exchange markets was little that the central bank could do to halt the gradual revaluation, apart from encouraging the outflow of capital from Norway into diversified investments abroad. Under a regime of floating rates currency changes, benefiting a minority of powerful exporters, can harm the majority of firms which seek to sell their merchandise abroad.
