The phrase "a close substitute for" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used when discussing alternatives or replacements for a particular item, concept, or idea.
Example: "In many recipes, applesauce can be a close substitute for oil, providing moisture without the added fat."
Alternatives: "a near equivalent to" or "a comparable alternative for".
As they point out, Iraqi oil, such as Basra Light, is a close substitute for Arabian Light.
The find proved to be a close substitute for the Chinese cultivar, and India's tea exports supplanted those of China by the 1860s.
But first a word of caution: intervention of this kind needs to be done rather carefully.If different kinds of capital were a close substitute for one another, there would be little need to hesitate in trying to improve the mix.
Cold weather in December created a shortage of heating oil and caused fears that a shortage of jet fuel would follow, because jet fuel is a close substitute for heating oil at refineries.
The employer sets the internal payoff to discovery-its bid-to equalize the marginal benefit of retaining employees who might otherwise leave to the marginal cost of establishing unfavorable incentives for future research and development for those employees who do not find venture capital financing a close substitute for continued employment.
A home in Portland, Oregon, is not a close substitute for a home in Portland, Maine, so even if a bubble were to develop in a local market, it would not inflate a national bubble.Yet many economists take the opposite view: that bubbles are in fact more likely to develop in housing markets than in stockmarkets.
This is consistent with evidence that child labour is a closer substitute for women's labour than it is for men's (Diamond and Fayed 1998; Ray 2000).
One possible reason for the relatively large absolute effects of maternal illness is that children's labour is a closer substitute for women's labour than it is for men's, either for cultural reasons or because men's labour often requires upper body strength that children lack, whereas women's labour involves stamina that children do have.
Hence, the rank two approximation (tilde {boldsymbol {Gamma }}_{text {Vienna}}) to the Viennese daily variation matrix (hat {boldsymbol {Gamma }}_{text {Vienna}}) is a closer substitute for (hat {boldsymbol {Gamma }}_{text {Linz}}) and (hat {boldsymbol {Gamma }}_{text {Lyon}}) than the full estimate (hat {boldsymbol {Gamma }}_{text {Vienna}}).
It seems impossible to conclusively refute that in the future elasticity is > 1, in the case of radically new technology that is a closer substitute for labor.
And if public spending is a very close substitute for private spending, there may well not be even temporary gains from higher spending.
