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Singapore, Liechtenstein, and the UAE are not democracies and all outpace neighboring countries in being nice places to live. Notably they have more civil freedom than a typical dictatorship, but they’re still not democracies. Andorra is arguably a partial example as well.
And the typical monarchy is pretty average for its neighborhood; they do, however, seem to avoid the dumbest mistakes very reliably, like communism or retarded foreign policy. Notably thé monarchy/dictatorship distinction is pretty core to the definition of both; you can reject the distinction, but it does seem to predict real trends in the real world. You can find past examples of benevolent dictatorships, if you look. You have to do a similar degree of looking to find terrible monarchs.
Singapore is the interesting mix that I already mentioned, I don't know anything about Liechtenstein so no comment but the UAE borders Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Oman is a monarchy, Qatar is a monarchy and so is SA, so any success you can attribute to the UAE there relative to the neighbors is not from having a monarchy, the neighbors do too!
Yeah, in the same way that China notably has a more open market than the traditional communist state and not a coincidence is better off than most of them (even if not at the Singapore/Taiwan/Hong Kong per capita levels). It's also not a coincidence that the more successful dictatorships and monarcies tend to be the weaker examples of the archetype!
Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Oman are also very nice places for citizens to live, by global standards, Nevermind Arab or middle eastern ones.
As far as civil freedom goes, people don’t like horrendous oppression. It makes places a less nice place to live, and enlightened despots were seen as excellent rulers for it in their own day- but the history of enlightened despotism indicates that this is not an impossible concept(there’s currently four examples- the UAE, Singapore, Andorra, and Liechtenstein. To explain the paucity I would point to the tendency to democratize being very pronounced). It is also difficult to achieve a high income economy without economic freedom, which is in turn very difficult to maintain without economic freedom.
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