Singapore is tiny, but with a GDP of $52,200 per capita, it certainly cannot be considered an emerging market; it has already emerged. For comparison, the U.S. has GDP per capita of just $46,000.

This is a small island country of five million people that used to be a British colony and a part of the Malay federation for a time. However, it was expelled from the federation because of ideological tensions in 1965 — and that may have been the best thing that happened to the country, especially considering that Malaysia right now has a GDP per capita of $7,500.

So why has Singapore made it so far, so fast?

In a way, Singapore is similar to Hong Kong — trade was the main driver of development over the years and the country is ranked as the world’s top logistic hub at present. The big kicker though is the rapidly-growing financial services sector, which is beginning to resemble an Asian version of Switzerland.

And since the most vibrant developing economies are concentrated in Asia, Singapore is likely to experience a much faster growth in financial services than Switzerland (which had serious international issues with bank secrecy laws last year).

Real GDP growth averaged 6.8% between 2004 and 2008, but contracted 2.1% in 2009 as the credit shock that followed the Lehman collapse froze global trade. Due to the shock, Singapore had 20% swings in quarterly GDP numbers in both directions in 2009. The government has continued to focus the reformation of the economy towards high value-added sectors like pharmaceuticals and medical technology, in addition to the great momentum that is behind the financial sector at present.

As is the case with Thailand or Hong Kong, there are no listed ADRs, but there are plenty solid companies that have sponsored ADRs that trade OTC. This is not a bad thing per se as large established companies often choose to trade OTC because they save money on listing fees — those are paid by the company to the NYSE — and they get to have non-compliant GAAP financial statements that conform to their local jurisdictions. GAAP compliance is not a guarantee for better accounting if you know the games that corporations play to get to their earnings numbers, so that rarely worries me with ADRs of established companies from major emerging markets.

Still, the two listed options — Singapore iShares (NYSE: EWS) and the closed-end Singapore Fund (NYSE: SGF) — mostly act as proxies for each other. It does not appear that there is that much difference between the two over the long term due to the passive management of the closed-end fund. The fund has tended to trade at a discount to NAV over the past year, which has slowly closed from a wide 14.5% to now 4.3%.

This closed-end fund is overweight on banking and real estate, as you can see. And although some of the biggest holdings here do have OTC-listed ADRs, they are quite illiquid — trading in some cases only a couple of hundred of shares per day.

In such situations, it is best to stick only with the ETF, or the closed-end fund, and concentrate on the more liquid ADRs using limit orders only. There are no dedicated mutual funds in the U.S. market as Singapore is too small for that. But, if you are looking for regional funds that have Singapore exposure, the experts at Matthews Asia Funds can help you.