According to new data from the World Bank, Asia's developing economies appear to be even more powerful than previously thought. As measured by purchasing power parity, China's gross domestic product now seems poised to overtake America's as the world's biggest as soon as this year. India has leapfrogged into third place, while Indonesia rounds out the top 10. Predictably, headlines around the region are crowing about the beginning of the long-awaited Asian Century.

Yet a darker story underlies these giddy new figures. In terms of per capita GDP, India doesn't rank third but 127th. (Indonesia is 107th, and China 99th.) Perhaps more importantly, while growth has mostly thrived over the last 20 years, inequality in Asia has also risen dramatically - from a reading of 0.33 to 0.46 between 1990 and 2010. Zero means perfect equality; the higher the number, the less egalitarian things are.

Behind the glitz of Asia's boom, reason for worry. The "New Century Global Centre" building in Chengdu, southwest China. Credit:AFP

Those who lag behind may soon find it harder and harder to catch up. The roughly 1.6 billion people living on less than $US2 a day - a standard measure for global poverty - are growing more vulnerable, according to the Asian Development Bank. These global poor confront a tsunami of risks from runaway inflation, to the impact of climate change on crops, Federal Reserve tapering, natural disasters, another global financial crisis, you name it.

What gives? While the macroeconomic picture in Asia has evolved in recent decades, barriers to economic mobility at the micro level persist. Thomas Piketty's bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century has lately drawn much attention to this problem. But in reading the book, I was struck more by its parallels to Joe Studwell's earlier Asian Godfathers.