The design of earth retaining structures during earthquakes is an important subject of the geotechnical engineering, mainly in the Andesian countries of South America. The most common approach consists in the use of some quasi-static method or technique based on Newmark s (1965) model to estimate inelastic displacements of the structure. The classical quasi-static method is the one proposed by Mononobe -Okabe (1926, 1929), as an extension of the Coulomb s (1773) theory to a dynamic context, while Richards and Elms (1979) suggested a design method based on inelastic displacements. In this thesis the dynamic response of a gravity retaining wall obtained through the finite element method are compared with those predicted by several other analytical formulation proposed in the literature, concerning both the resultant of the earth pressures and the wall displacements experienced during the earthquake. The advantages and shortcomings in the application of all these methods are discussed herein, as well as several modeling aspects are discussed that must be carefully considered by the geotechnical engineer in order to obtain a representative simulation of the dynamical problem.