During the past decade, Massachusetts' Asian-American community experienced tremendous growth in both population and income, according to new statistics from The Boston Globe and the State University of New York at Albany's Lewis Mumford Center.

The picture-perfect economy of the 1990s benefitted all of Massachusetts' racial groups, but Asian Americans saw their annual household income increase by 14 percent, second only to the 25-percent growth of Native Americans.

Far behind were Latinos, whites and African Americans, whose income levels grew by 7, 6 and 2 percent, respectively.

The increased income brings Asian Americans nearly to the same earning level of whites. Asian Americans earned 97 cents on the dollar compared with whites, according to the study. The median household incomes in 1999 were $53,051 for whites and $51,273 for Asian Americans.

These new figures come after the release of Census 2000 statistics, which documented a 69-percent growth of the Asian-American population in the United States from 1990 to 2000. The country's 12 million Asian Americans make up more than 4 percent of the total U.S. population.

"The Asian presence in this country was once symbolized by Chinatowns in major cities. There are now as many as six distinct Asian national-origin groups with more than a million residents," according to a Lewis Mumford Center report on Asians.

There remains a big difference in the quality of life between whites and most minority groups. The Lewis Mumford Center's researchers examined the neighborhoods where the average person of each race lives and found that the areas that are home to African Americans and Latinos have more poverty, less homeownership and less education that the typical white neighborhood.

Asian Americans live in better-educated neighborhoods than whites, but they fall behind when it comes to homeownership and poverty rates.

"How people do in life doesn't depend entirely on their own income, but what quality of life are they able to achieve with that income," John R. Logan, director of the Lewis Mumford Center, told The Globe. "What kind of schools their children will go to, how secure the neighborhood is, how fast their homes appreciate in value. Minorities, regardless of their own incomes, tend to live in neighborhoods that offer less in these respects."