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As an index to measure the cultural differences between countries, culture distance (CD) is a widely used construct in international business and postulated to be symmetric in previous studies. However, CD symmetry across different countries is been demonstrated to result in the national CD paradox. A new asymmetry index utility cultural distance (UCD) is proposed to replace the previous one in this study. The cultural utility function is applied to calculate the UCD for a particular country, where the cultural bias could cause the asymmetric change of cultural score. The index is verified to be a significant variable in the regression analysis of China’s outward foreign directing investment to 17 other countries in 15 years. The UCD demonstrated in this paper corrects the fallacious symmetry assumption on cultural distance and can maintain a consistent and effective conclusion on cultural differences in international business studies.

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