【正文】 ly emerging. The National Adaptation Program of Action (NAPA 2020), prepared by the Ministry of Environment and Forests, suggests exploring options for spreading natural disaster risks by investigating the potential of crop insurance markets so that agricultural farmers are better prepared to cope with the increased risk of crop damage. Two feasibility studies, one by the Ministry of Commerce and another by the Department of Environment, are currently underway to test the feasibility of crop insurance in the most calamity prone areas of Bangladesh. Although microinsurance is often referred to as an effective tool for reducing, sharing or spreading climaterelated costs and risks, the mercial viability of such insurance schemes has been a key challenge for poor developing economies as the transfer of losses from affected groups to the munity at large is not feasible at an affordable premium rate. Although the experience and available information are too limited to reach any conclusion about such schemes, overall, crop insurance has not been very successful based on standard mercial criteria throughout the world. Especially in developing countries where the poorest counterparts of the population often find themselves in a spiral of recurrent damages due to natural calamities, disaster insurance schemes fail to earn enough premium ine to cover payouts as well as administrative costs. The aim of the study presented here is to assess the financial viability of a potential crop insurance market in Bangladesh, one of the poorest and most disaster prone countries in the world. In a large scale household survey carried out at the end of 2020, 3600 riverine and coastal floodplain residents in Bangladesh were asked for their preferences for crop insurance schemes using the double bounded (DB) contingent valuation (CV) method, . asking them for their willingness to pay (WTP) for crop insurance schemes to eliminate future catastrophe risks. Although application of CV to estimate crop insurance demand is fairly widespread nowadays, such an extensive and explicit feasibility test of a potential crop insurance market in a severely natural disaster prone developing country is currently lacking. Previous studies mainly focused on estimating average WTP and in determining the factors that affect demand for crop insurance. The current study goes beyond estimation of average WTP, using the data obtained through an extensive DB CV survey, by testing a simple analytical model of long term sustainability and mercial viability outlined by Hazell. Although there are numerous relevant actuarial issues associated with an insurance design as well (. premium setting, adverse selection, moral hazard), they fall outside the scope of the current study. We are primarily interested in testing potentiality of a future crop insurance market based on basic cost recovery criteria across spatially dispersed geographical areas that differ in terms of environmental risks and socioeconomic characteristics. Analytical framework The analytical framework of this study is based on a simple model used by Hazell . According to Hazell , the premium collected on an insurance scheme must exceed average payouts in order to ensure the viability of the insurance contract, where average payout is modeled by summing up both administrative costs per insurance contract and indemnities. The term ‘indemnity’ refers to the pensation sum that insurers make to the holder of the insurance contract upon post assessment of damage due to a disaster event. We hypothesized a simple design of linear indemnity payout function of the following form for a specific insurance scheme i: Ii =Di If Disaster event strikes Ii =0 If Disaster event does not strike where, insurer Di damage incurred by the insured Ii indemnity paid by the Therefore, the condition for a viable and sustainable insurance contract takes the following