The phrase "a decent proxy for" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used when discussing a substitute or stand-in that reasonably represents or approximates something else.
Example: "In this study, we found that the average temperature can serve as a decent proxy for overall climate change trends."
Alternatives: "a good substitute for" or "an adequate representation of".
Seismologists know that how long an earthquake lasts is a decent proxy for its magnitude.
These are early data, but we suspect this is a decent proxy for what will happen inside an organization over time.
Religious census figures provide a decent proxy for the numbers that sustain both clubs: in 2001, less than 18% of the population of Scotland identified as being Roman Catholic.
That allows a look at how G-rated pictures, a decent proxy for children's films, perform at the box office: As it turns out, G-rated films, on average, book domestic box office returns that are about 2.4 times production budget and global box office returns that are about 5.3 times budget.
In a paper published by the IMF in January, three economists, Ashoka Mody, Anusha Nath and Michael Walton, looked at the Bombay Stock Exchange, a decent proxy for India's formal business sector, with thousands of firms listed on it, many very small.
Yet despite them, and for whatever reason, GDP generally serves as a decent proxy for economic performance.
Fortunately, expected heterozygosity can serve as a decent proxy of the informativeness [25], [29], [30].
Going to church, of course, is not the same as religiosity, but it serves as a decent proxy, Gallup argues: religion likely plays a more significant day-to-day role for someone who attends church weekly.
A decent proxy is its SG&A (Selling, General and Administrative Expenses), which is about 11% of revenues.
At the same time, Wichita is also a decent proxy for plenty of other blue-collar but socially conservative places like Allentown, Pa., and Columbus, Ohio — the swing districts of the swing states that decide elections.
The controllers had a good weight to them, and made decent proxies for my hands in virtual space.
