Singapore has done extremely well economically.
But it's not cool. That's something else.
Tokyo, for example, is cool, fashion, music, films and computer games come out of Tokyo.
But that's very hard to say of Singapore.
Perhaps it's like Luxembourg and Lisbon.
Admittedly the link at the top is from Marginal Revolution where 'cool' may mean economically successful and interesting for policy makers.
I haven't heard of many examples of people having profoundly positive impacts on the world being raised in either of those two countries. Of course, this will be impacted by their size and in the case of Dubai, it's recent ascendancy. Still, it makes me very wary of that claim.