Singapore's main price gauge contracted for a record tenth consecutive month in November, data showed on Wednesday, with prices down 0.1% from a year earlier.

The falling streak is the longest since 1991, the earliest period when percentage changes on core inflation data became available on the Singapore Department of Statistics website.

The Southeast Asian economy's core prices last contracted for nine consecutive months during the 2008-09 financial crisis.

Core inflation — the central bank's favoured price measure —was expected to have fallen 0.1%, according to the median of seven economists surveyed by Reuters.

Singapore's headline consumer price index was down 0.1% from a year earlier, data from the Department of Statistics showed. Economists had forecast a 0.2% drop.

Authorities in the city-state, battling its deepest ever recession due to the Covid-19 pandemic, expect core and headline inflation to come in between −0.5 and 0% in 2020