  We study the relationship between space-time-matter (STM) and brane theories.
These two theories look very different at first sight, and have different
motivation for the introduction of a large extra dimension. However, we show
that they are equivalent to each other. First we demonstrate that STM predicts
local and non-local high-energy corrections to general relativity in 4D, which
are identical to those predicted by brane-world models. Secondly, we notice
that in brane models the usual matter in 4D is a consequence of the dependence
of five-dimensional metrics on the extra coordinate. If the 5D bulk metric is
independent of the extra dimension, then the brane is void of matter. Thus, in
brane theory matter and geometry are unified, which is exactly the paradigm
proposed in STM. Consequently, these two 5D theories share the same concepts
and predict the same physics. This is important not only from a theoretical
point of view, but also in practice. We propose to use a combination of both
methods to alleviate the difficult task of finding solutions on the brane. We
show an explicit example that illustrate the feasibility of our proposal.
